DOGOS
by Akktri
Summary: About a mysterious corporation, and its ties to Pandora.
1. Chapter 1: Sleepwalker

"He's been sleepwalking again," mom was telling the doctor. "Yesterday I caught him peeing on the living room rug. Last night he ate an entire bucket of ice cream, threw up, then climbed up on the roof in his underwear, howling at the moon and waking up everyone in the house."

I didn't deny it. Whenever I dreamed of the blue people, things happened. One time I found myself standing naked on the sidewalk, one hand fondling my privates, the other clutching the barbecued remains of the neighbor's cat. I spent a week in Western Mental, where everything is white and you're not allowed any sharp objects.

I've gone to see Dr. Galwyn more times than I can count. He's the shrink I go to when you can't afford a good one. He didn't cure anything. I take sedatives every night, but they don't help at all. In fact, they make it worse.

Dr. Galwyn was a bald slack jawed black man half a head shorter than me. His face always looks happy, but I wonder if it's forced.

The decor in his office consisted of carefully chosen artifacts reflecting a doctoral education in psychology. _Where the Wild Things Are_, due to its relevance to children's Freudian psychology. A Picasso due to its subjective interpretation. Escher due to his effective trickery of human visual perception. A bust of Freud. A framed autographed picture of Philp G. Zimbardo. Educational toys.

The desk had photographs of family to establish the doctor's emotional stability, more than likely a facade.

He asked me about the dreams again, and I told him what I told him before. I hunted weird animals in an alien jungle. I had sex, which somehow involved heavy use of dreadlocked hair. I rode on the back of a giant leathery pterodactyl thing.

The doctor thinks it's something to do with me not having a girlfriend and watching Disney's Avatar too much. That explanation never made sense because I only saw it once in theaters and hated it. It was two hours too long in my opinion, so, what, I unconsciously fantasize about it?

As we conversed in his little office decorated with musty psychology books the doctor has probably never read, he recommended an MRI.

So then I went to the hospital.

The MRI room was a spotless cube with a giant boxy machine dating back to the late 1970's, an item too expensive to replace, but not outdated enough to suffer a forced retirement. I had no metal body parts to shield me from the stupidity, so I allowed them to sedate me.

They secured me to a table with straps and shoved me inside the chrome tube until I drifted off.

When I awoke, I was surrounded by people in lab coats muttering things about my nocturnal disorder.

They removed my restraints, and I found red marks on my wrists and ankles where I had fought to pull myself out of the machine, and someone remarked that I had been yelling incoherently in a foreign language.

Then I was sitting in a small examination room a couple doors down. My doctor through all this process was a smooth talking jerk with slicked back hair and gleaming teeth.

"We're going to try an experimental dream suppressant," the doctor was saying. "It's called Hypnocil. We'll start off on thirty five milligram tabs and see what that does to you."

I rolled my eyes. The last time I tried an `experimental' drug like that, I nearly flunked college. The biology teacher came up to my desk and made jokes about me sleeping in class. I'd open a history textbook in a hard plastic chair in the cafeteria, and sleep through Spanish. I ruined five sheets of expensive framing material in art class because I didn't realize you cut the material with the sharp side of the knife. Why did I cut with the dull side? Because of Paxil.

Unfortunately, I had no choice. My parents were the only reason why I hadn't gone to jail for indecent exposure. Something had to be done, or I'd never be able to move out and have a productive life.

So the doctor scribbles something on a pad, and then I'm taking Hypnocil every night before bed.

The dreams seem to stop after that, and I could finally get on with my life. Or so I thought.


	2. Chapter 2: NCO

For a week, I actually felt normal. I got to bed at a reasonable hour, and for the first time in several months, I felt well rested and alert enough to handle the 6:30 to 2:30 morning shift at my job without excessive amounts of caffeine. The pills caused itching, vertigo and mild depression, but I wasn't sleepwalking, so I was content.

That was, until Monday of the following week.

I work at a place called NCO. I earn enough there to pay for an apartment, but haven't done so on account of the sleepwalking. NCO is a gray cube out in the middle of the Kansas countryside.

The office is one of several in the semicircle of blocky concrete buildings set up around the company parking lot. Outside of this to one side is an empty weed choked field, which I have occasionally explored during breaks.

I arrived at the building around 5:30 in the morning, a half hour too early to start my shift, and a good twenty to thirty minutes too early for the building to open, depending on the manager on duty that day.

I was tired again, though I didn't know why. I was still taking my medication, but it hadn't seemed to help the night before. I had a strange dream about mom and dad being blue cat people, and we were celebrating Thanksgiving in a jungle.

I saw an old blue skinned female creature dressed in skins. She came up to me with a shard of bone and stabbed me with it, cackling as she wiggled it around until blood poured out of it like a small fountain.

I fought her away and tried to run, but she kept coming after me with the bone, laughing hysterically. My parents didn't try to stop her. Instead they just told me to stop being mean to grandma Mo'at.

When I awoke, I found myself lying naked on the bedroom floor. I always sleep with my clothes on.

I didn't tell my parents. Instead, I pretended nothing happened, and carried through with my normal routine.

In the deserted parking lot, I laid in the folded passenger seat of my gold four door sedan, trying to squeeze in a cat nap as a heavy rain beat a monotonous rhythm on the roof, doing its tapdance on my windows. From time to time, gusts of wind periodically slapped extra rain against the passenger glass, whistling thin notes through the window seals and cracks in the door frames.

On my rearview, a sloppily printed name badge reading Jason Finch danced a slight jig to the music of the purring engine.

While the engine idled, allowing the heater to pump out its comforting heat, my radio served me a soothing dose of bible study, courtesy of Larry Wood. I had picked it at random by pushing the scan button.

The man sounded like he was in his eighties. He and his assistant spend the hour discussing bible passages, which always makes me a bit drowsy. I was in a drowsy state of mind in which I could be listening to commercials for ten minutes without realizing I was listening to anything until I started whistling jingles for plumbing services.

After closing my eyes a few minutes, I sat up and checked the dashboard clock. Only eight minutes had passed. As I rolled back to a reclining position, I thought I saw motion out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, I saw nothing but a wide empty stretch of pavement leading to a solitary yellow car, a grassy field, and a dilapidated barn on some farm property in the distance.

I did not see a man in a black suit. I figured that little detail was a product of my sleep problem the night before, and that I had only managed four hours of sleep, with a bathroom break in the middle. Still, I couldn't fully sleep in a car seat.

I shut my eyes again, letting Mr. Wood's cute bible jokes seep into my groggy brain.

Hearing an engine, he sat up.

5:42. In my weariness, even the building seemed to be the wrong color.

I sat up, assessing the night's damage in the mirror. Unkempt red hair, bloodshot blue eyes surrounded by freckled bags. *Yeah, I'm ready for work.*

I slung my sloppily printed ID badge over my toothpaste splattered green polo.

Deciding to let the rain take care of the toothpaste, I locked up, marching into the storm.

No lightning. The sky above the gray cinder block of a building looked like a Hollywood matte painting, unnaturally bright and colorful in contrast to its shadowy surroundings. The type of sky Leonidas would scream in front of.

After pausing a moment to stare at the sky, wondering if it were computer composited, I marched up to the back entrance on one of the gray cubes, swiping my name badge across the security scanner.

I pulled on the door handle, but it didn't open. With my shirt quickly becoming a wet washcloth and my hair matting down over my eyes, I scanned my badge and tried it again. The door lock still refused to open. My watch said 5:46. I thought for certain they would be open.

Contrary to popular belief, many employee badges do not unlock a building at all hours of the day and night. When a manager wants the building locked up for the evening, they actually shut down the security lock so nobody can get in without a real key.

I gave it another tug, then frowned at the downpour blowing through the parking lot.

With a sigh, I got back in my car, waited about ten minutes, then tried the door again. The sensor light failed to turn green.

A familiar rusty gray pickup sped past, parking a few spaces down from me.

Harry, I thought. I was hoping for a manager, since they were the ones that unlocked the building.

The lights on the truck went dark and a man with white hair and a button down shirt stepped out, marching up to the building.

"Door won't open?" he yelled.

I shrugged, walking over to a nearby window.

Seeing nobody occupying the desks, and venetian blinds covering the other windows, I marched over a small hill, crossing a staircase to a window with an unobstructed view, peering at the desks near the back office.

I pressed my face against the glass and stared in there a few minutes, and as the rain poured down on my head, I saw a man in a black two piece suit walking behind the row of desks nearest the window

I'd never seen this stranger before in my life. I figured he was from Sprint's corporate headquarters, or some new manager.

I frowned, wondering if it were worth it to tap on the glass.

For some reason, the man was waving around an alarm clock like he were using it to check for radiation. It was the first of many puzzling things I would soon find out about this company.

"Is anybody in there?" I heard Harry saying over my shoulder.

"I don't know. Some weird guy with an alarm clock."

Harry peered in the window. "I don't see anything."

I frowned as I watched the suited figure hold the clock up against the various computer monitors.

"He's doing something with the computers."

"Maybe he's tech support or something."

A second later, he disappeared into a manager's tall cubicle.

"I think you're looking at a chair. It's hard to see anything in this rain."

"A moving chair?"

"Maybe I'm not looking at the right desk. Try knocking and see if he opens the door."

I hesitated, wondering if I had actually seen the man.

Harry knocked on the glass. "Hello!"

Just then the suited man came back out, sticking something on one of the phones.

A moment later, a fat bearded figure in a Star Trek shirt stepped out of a hallway near the bathrooms. Todd, the call control monitor. I guess he'd been in the bathroom or something.

I always hope that Todd will open the door, but he rarely does. I watched him anxiously as he waddled down a row of desks, oblivious to my presence as usual.

I gasped in shock as I saw him step right through the man in the suit like he wasn't there. I rubbed my eyes, trying to rationalize what I was seeing.

"Something the matter?" Harry asked.

"N-no," I stammered.

Harry's rapped on the glass again, and as he did, I blinked, and the man in the suit vanished like he'd never been there. I just stared at the empty spot with my mouth hanging open, wondering if my insanity wasn't limited to merely seeing blue people and sleepwalking.


	3. Chapter 3: Oddities in the Office

Hearing a muted beep and a click, I turned and saw Harry opening the door.

Worried that I'd be late, and completely drenched, I tried to forget the strange suited figure, hurrying up to the door with my badge.

Generally, at this hour of day, the building would be unlocked by one of three managers, Jolene, Gary or Sam, the team lead. On this particular morning, it was Jolene, a short, unfriendly woman with straight blonde hair. She didn't say a word to us, she only regarded us with a bored expression and walked away. She wasn't any better at mornings than I was.

Once through the cramped little security hallway beyond, I set about my morning preparations.

The break room had three refrigerators, one broken, one completely full of other people's lunch sacks, and it wasn't easy to find space in the third. I stuffed my mac and cheese in between plastic bags of unidentifiable substances, on top of a cheesecake tray that had occupied that same shelf for more than three weeks. At other jobs, I'd have to remove my food at a certain hour to prevent the janitor from throwing it out. Not here.

As I warmed up my first cup of coffee of the day, I noticed a figure in a Hawaiian shirt and khakis sipping a steaming beverage as he stared out the giant glass windows. The rain pounded the glass in thick shadowy sheets that made it difficult to see past the street lamps in the parking lot.

"Boy, it's really coming down," the old man said. "Reminds me of that one time I went canoing on Lake Michigan. I was out in the middle and I took on so much water I thought I'd have to swim to shore!"

I just said "huh" and drank my coffee. It was too early for me to tell stories, even if I could tell it in a clever and humorous way. I left him, marching into the call center.

I was practically the only one there. At six in the morning, the neatly arranged ranks of empty chairs and desks reminded me of what people say the rapture would be like. Or maybe one of those movies where some giant weapon causes all of humanity to disappear. Kind of creepy.

As usual, Steve the I.T. guy was at a computer, monitoring call volume statistics and idling in a teleconference with hold music ripped from the Adventures of Ben Casey. I've heard that song so many times that I wonder why I'm not whistling that in my sleep instead of spouting gibberish.

The man was overweight, his stomach sagging over his pants, but his hair and beard were well groomed. For a brusque, silent type, the fact that he wore Star Wars shirts and occasionally showed up dressed like King Arthur on the way to a battle made him kind of cool.

Still puzzling about the stranger in the tux, I sneaked over to the area in which I'd seen him waving around the clock.

For the most part, nothing looked like it had been touched. I saw nothing extraordinary about any of the desks or computers. In fact, nothing at all seemed amiss until I peeked into the manager cubicle I'd seen the stranger vanish into.

On the manager's desk, next to the phone, I found a tiny black triangular object marked with a curving scythe shaped symbol and a red flashing light. I stepped further inside the cubicle, reaching out to pick up the device.

Before I could touch it, I heard a voice shout, "Hey! What are you doing! Get out of there!"

I turned and saw the top of a shiny bald head. I looked down and saw a squatty dwarf in a Hawaiian shirt. Vincent.

Vincent was one of my favorite managers, simply because he was a dwarf. Just seeing him handle his team and waddle around the office made me grin. I wanted to pick him up. I always had thought it a shame that I wasn't on his team.

Of course, grinning isn't the best thing to do when someone's pissed off at you.

"Sorry," I stammered, fighting down a smile. "I..."

I jerked my hand back, stepping away from the desk.

"Shoo!" the dwarf said, waving me away.

I quickly backed off, watching the little man as jumped up and threw his stomach over the desk, unplugging something from the computer.

I saw him stuff whatever it was into his pocket, then.

His face turned a bright red when he noticed I hadn't moved. With an angry glare, he growled, "Shouldn't you be logged into the phones already!"

"Right!" I stammered, hurrying away.

As I darted around a row of cubicles, I nearly collided with a fat broad in tight fitting clothes. When she turned around, her bottom portion looked like a rhinoceros being pressed through a canvas tent, her upper portion a lovely vision of a sumo wrestler in tight stretchy cotton.

I shuddered. To some people, the dress code was just a suggestion.

We glared at each other for a moment. She had on old man glasses and an ugly knitted hat made of yarn. Classy.

When she walked past me, it was like the Sta Puft Marshmallow Man stomping through downtown Manhattan. Slow, plodding gait that shifted her whole body to a forty five degree angle with each step, her arms swinging in wide spans to clear space in both directions.

I hurried to my desk, logged into the phone and computer, and took calls for two hours.

"Why my phone off. Why my bill so high? I promise to pay you next Saturday. I didn't know my account was charged off against my credit." This is what the conversations consisted of.

The rows behind me filled up with coworkers. Then I noticed a black man in glasses logging into the phone next to me. His name was Curtis. Curtis was cool, but the way he talked to customers, I really couldn't figure out why they hadn't fired him. We're supposed to be getting payments for phone reactivations, not talking about sports, or preaching, or political scandals, which he got into after his third call.

"You know, I really think it's ridiculous what they're doing to him," he was saying to the customer. "Barring him from the team due to sexual misconduct. I mean, it's not like he did that on the field or the locker room. It was with his ex wife and that man. Granted they were both connected to the NFL, but what he does off the field really should be his business and his business alone."

I rolled my eyes and pretended I wasn't hearing this.

I took my break, got a cup of coffee, and returned to the phone.

Misapplied payment dispute. An argument about late fees. One payment. Lots of promises.

The calls were suspended for training, so I flipped through a pointless instruction module designed for sales and technical support, something that had no bearing on collections, then laid my head on my desk as I waited for everyone else to finish.

"Rough night?" said a voice behind me.

I groggily sat up, turning my chair to face the speaker. "I had insomnia."

"Take some Benadril," said a whiny sounding fat guy in the row behind me. "That works pretty good."

"Me, I take a shot of whiskey like this." Harry held up a couple pinched together fingers. "Mix it with orange juice or hot milk, and it puts me right out."

"What I do is get some hot juice or tea," said a voice to my right. "Take a cup of that and watch the Weather Channel for a few minutes, and I have no problem sleeping."

My two cubicle mates then got into a discussion about news stories, a badly concealed murder, the culprit's weak alibi, and some unsupervised kids dying from playing a game involving a plastic bag. Soon the topic changed to plans for the weekend. Harry said he got his truck fixed, and he was fishing at the lake, spurring a discussion about trophy catches.

I took my lunch and came back to find them still chewing the fat.

I suddenly noticed a strange new face in the office, an athletic looking forty year old woman with curly brown hair and narrow angular features. The woman had on a white shirt and black slacks, and carried a clipboard full of papers.

She was going down the rows, notating something or another, but I couldn't tell what. I typed a message into my Spark chat about it, but I couldn't get an answer.

I've learned to be cautious ab out what I say in Spark. I made some jokes in the chat that nearly got me fired. But I figured a question about business wouldn't hurt anything.

The silence got me to wonder if I were wrong.

At last, someone said that the woman was checking computer towers. They had to know which one went to which login ID, which seemed plausible, except she seemed to be looking more at our faces than our computers.

"Who is she?" I typed.

Another long pause.

"I think her name is Grace," said a fat guy in the row behind mine. The back of his chair faced me, but I could tell it was Max by the whiny voice. "I think she's a new manager."

"Grace Augustine," someone told me in a Spark.

"Funny," I typed. "She doesn't look much like Sigourney Weaver."

The other employee replied by saying he once worked with a guy named Fred Flinstone and he didn't look like his TV counterpart, either.

About ten minutes later, the "training" ended, and I was back to talking to customers about their bill.

I took my last break for the day, and as I was standing around the break room, I suddenly noticed the strange woman retrieving a Diet Coke from a vending machine.

When she saw me, the first thing she said was, "Mobmik! Viravo poiagutewe?"

For reasons unknown to me, I blurted something I didn't understand, following it up with a confused "What?"

She only laughed and walked away.

Thoroughly confused, and thinking it were all a joke, I returned to my desk, too tired to fully understand what had just happened.

An hour later, and I began to wish I had fixed another cup of coffee, as my head kept drooping forward as I handled the calls, getting accused of being drunk a few times. I stood up to combat the fatigue, and I managed to make it to 2:30 without seriously botching a call.

Everything seemed fine as I marched through the now crowded office and got into my car, but when I shifted into reverse, I suddenly heard a crunch.

Shifting back into my space, I got out to check the damage.

I had just accidentally backed into a dirty black Trans Am with a license plate reading "SNAKER." A string of little skulls the size of ping pong balls hung from the car's rearview. The skull motif carried on through the seat and steering wheel covers.

I could see the handle of a gun poking out from beneath the passenger seat.

Uh-oh.


	4. Chapter 4: Quarrels

I saw a huge dent in my rear bumper, but the car behind me looked no worse for wear.

I looked all around the car, but it looked like I had done more damage to my rear fender than the other car. I saw a little blotch of discolored paint, but that was it.

No noteworthy scratches, dent marks or any other glaringly obvious signs of damage. Nothing important like headlights or anything were affected. The car needed washing, and the birds hated it. That's all I could surmise.

I would have left a note, but I figured it would just stir up trouble. I couldn't even tell if that's what I hit anyway. It's pretty much like hitting a light pole and leaving a note telling it I'm sorry. Cheap Japanese cars.

I just knew that if I left the other guy a note, he'd inflate the figure of the blotch to make it sound like I caved in his front end, so I just drove home.

I wish I had my own place.

My house is in the suburbs, a plain looking split level with a garage, a concrete stoop with an awning serving as the front porch, and a brick flower box full of dirt and dead plants.

The architecture was identical to every other house in the neighborhood. In fact, I once went to a Christmas party in the house next door and I knew exactly where the bathroom was, even though I'd never been there before. The floor plan was that similar.

The main thing that made our house different was that the sliding glass door on the back was stubborn, there were books and papers and piles of junk everywhere, and the garage smelled like dog pee.

I wish I could move out.

I smelled my dad the moment I came through the door.

Inhuman body odor and cigarettes.

He was retired, had only a few friends he met once a month, and his marriage was cold, which meant he didn't care about showering, I guess.

He was small and wiry now, a far cry from the big leathery reptile of a man that used to squeeze my throat until I passed out when I accidentally dropped the dishes.

His skin had the appearance of cured cowhide, discolored and stretched by the sun, yellowed by nicotine.

He was smoking and watching NCIS, the Thanksgiving episode I've seen dozens of times.

Thanks to his Camel rewards, he owns a frayed Joe Camel jacket and Joe Camel seat covers. He has other merchandise too, but it's not as interesting due to the removal of Joe from the public scene. Those cigs aren't too good for his breathing, but it helps to mask the smell.

As I glanced at the scene with DiNozzo complaining about the food at the Indian casino again, dad looked up at me and I wondered what schizoid personality I'd be facing this time.

Last month, he was mellow. Too mellow. When I tried to get up and do things, he got upset because I was blocking the TV and making noise. When I went to my room and played on the computer, he complained I was avoiding him and not being part of the family. But the only thing we do as a family anymore is watch TV.

This month, he was manic. He became obsessed with removing recycling bins from the house and places in the yard, trimming the hedges at four in the morning, and micromanaging my house work.

This time, he started bragging about how he mowed the grass in the rain, both the back and the front yard, and did all the dishes. He complained that there had been a layer of black film on one side of the sink where the dishes had soaked for too long, lecturing me for about eight minutes on how I should wash the dishes with greater frequency.

Well, that, and how he constantly has to do things like clean blood out of the bathtub and the sink and pick up after other messes I make during my sleepwalking episodes.

I looked away, staring dully at the barf green carpeting on the floor as he lectured me. There is nothing more annoying than being lectured on how to do something when someone already did it for you. Plus, he exaggerates. Generally I'm the only one who does the dishes. A lot of what's in the other side of the sink isn't dishes, it's mom's recyclables, and it has a slow drain. And I only put dishes in the dishwasher when I can actually fill it.

Knowing that arguing would only prolong his lecture to infinity, I bit my tongue and let the complaining wash over me.

Once he was satisfied that he'd made his point, I marched up to my room, enduring jeers about how I was "sulking" and "hiding in my cave" because I was "upset that I couldn't leave a black film on all the dishes in the sink".

I fancy myself a cartoonist, though I really haven't had any success with it.

My cartoon is kind of like Judge Dredd, except they're squirrels and they do funny things. It's better than I describe it. I go to places like Deviantart and post samples every week, but I just get ignored. I hated my dad for calling my artwork "dribblings", but maybe that's what they are.

At any rate, that's what I was working on in my room. After that, I prepared supper while mom ironed her clothes for work tomorrow.

Dad hates fish, but I cooked it because that's what we had.

He complained about it for the entire duration of the cooking process, about twenty minutes, as if someone were pointing a gun at him and telling him he had to eat it, when I couldn't care less if he ate it or not.

"I'm not eating!" he announced, as if he were the only person in the house to cook for.

As I set out the plates and silverware, he grabbed a box of cookies and a bologna sandwich, pigging out in front of the television.

The rest of us ate in silence, and quickly, my shirtless brother doing his usual weird thing of wrapping his piece of fish in a tortilla.

At last mom spoke, telling us a story about a nightmare of a customer at the health clinic check in desk, and a diabetic patient who fell on the floor and needed five people to get her into a wheelchair.

After another silence, dad started another rant about how I left a pot in the sink. He made it sound like I was letting the dishes stack up to the ceiling, of course other people put their stuff in there too, but it wasn't nearly as bad as before when we had a layer of black crud on the left side of the sink.

"You're going to make it like you had it before when no one was doing the dishes and we had a layer of black mold over everything."

"But I did the dishes," I protested. "I actually put things in the washer once a week."

"You need to do it more than that. I don't want dishes in this sink anymore."

"If I do that, someone will take the dirty dish out of the dish washer and try to use it."

"That's why you've got to wash it, not just put it in the dishwasher."

I shook my head in disgust. "So I'm supposed to run the washer with two dishes in it? That's a waste of soap!"

"Don't be ridiculous. You know exactly what I meant. You're not going to leave the dishes piled up in the sink like you had it before."

I sighed and gave up trying to argue.

Mom went upstairs to watch TV in her bed.

When I finished eating, I scrubbed my plate, cup and silverware clean with an SOS pad and rinsed them off.

"Now you're just being stupid!" dad said. "You're washing dishes by hand just because I said something."

I frowned. "You want the sink empty, but you're not letting it get full enough for me to actually use the dishwasher. You want me to waste soap and just wash this one dish in the washer?"

"If we had it your way, the sink would have a ring of black mold around it like we had before I started cleaning them."

"Excuse me! I always do the dishes!"

"Then why was there a ring of black shit all around the sink? Why were there dishes piled all the way to the ceiling?"

"I had to have actual dishes to put in the washer! I can't just put one dish in there and run it! It's a waste of soap! But I did the dishes! There was only a ring around that one side because it had dog dishes and recyclables in there."

"Now you just want to argue. You know full well what needs to be done. You just don't want to do it."

"No, you just got jealous because mom says I'm the only one doing dishes around the house, so you're trying to show me up!"

He hit me in the side of my head. It smarted, but it actually hurt my pride more than it injured me.

I could have fought back, but I knew better. I just shut my mouth.

"If you don't like the way I'm running this house, you can leave."

I almost got kicked out for screaming at the neighbors at four in the morning and firing arrows at their windows. Another sleepwalking episode. Somehow I assembled a bow out of a PVC pipe, one of those rubber straps mom uses to tie off patients' veins, old car keys and a bag of yard debris. MacGyver would have been proud.

Dad wasn't. He started shouting for me to leave the house, and how he'd call the police, then he starts trying to drag me out the door. If mom hadn't been there, I would have been homeless.

For this reason, I didn't dare reply. I was skating on thin ice as it was. Instead, I just nodded, putting things in the dishwasher.

The small handful of things that didn't deserve to be washed by themselves.

Once I had the machine running, I marched back up to my room.

"That's right. Go hide in your cave!" dad shouted. "Go hide just like everyone in this house!"

To me, that made absolutely no sense. He argues, he smacks me, then he wants me to hang out in the living room and "be a family."

I paid him no attention, choosing instead to embellish my pictures of squirrels blowing people's brains out.

About half an hour later, I heard my father and mother shouting from downstairs.

"What did you do to the car!"

Startled, I put down my markers, rushing to the front drive, where my parents stood staring at the damage done to my rear bumper.

Seeing that the cat was already out of the bag, I broke down and told them what happened.

"Dad, um...I was at work today, and I think I may have backed into someone's car when I was pulling out."

"Did you leave a note?"

"Well," I stammered. "No, I..."

"Hit and run is against the law, you know."

I swallowed. "The damage looks like it's all on my end."

"That's not what the court will say. It doesn't matter. You've got to at least leave a note."

He took a puff on his cigarette. "You got insurance, right?"

"It's all my fault," I said. "There's no point in making the rates higher. It's only cosmetic damage. It'll be fine."

"It doesn't matter. The other driver is going to look at the car, and he's going to ask questions. The longer you delay, the sooner he'll send the FBI to arrest you. You'd better leave a note pronto, and pray he won't press charges."

I shook my head. "There's no telling if he's still there. He might be working the same shift. I'll leave the note tomorrow."

"You'd better!"

And on that note, my father grumpily marched back into the house.

The next morning, I woke up naked beneath a crude tipi made of fallen sticks from my yard, trash bags and piles of leaves. The only reason why I didn't miss work was because I snapped awake at four in the morning.

No violence this time, but apparently I had fashioned several crude wreath things out of found objects and laid them all over the house in some strange ceremonial fashion.


	5. Chapter 5: Snaker

My work day started out ordinary and unremarkable. The sky looked normal, and nothing weird happened.

After I had parked in the lot, I checked the other spaces, but didn't see Snaker's car anywhere. Getting nervous, I waited for the doors to open, keeping a watchful eye for that black Trans Am.

When 5:45 passed without a sign of the vehicle, I could only sigh and walked into the building, going about my normal business.

Arguments about premium data charges and text messages. A thirty minute fraud call where the woman cried into the phone and refused to speak to the fraud department. A "why is my phone off" call. Etcetera.

I fell into the usual routine of setting up extensions on phone service, asking for payments, explaining bills, and informing people that their accounts were in collections.

I took a call from a woman who said that the phone account with her name and social security number actually belonged to her roommate, demanding that I call the roommate and make her pay, after I switched her phone service back on. I told her no, which resulted in it being escalated to a supervisor. Usual stuff.

About twenty minutes into this, I saw his corporate instant messenger flashing red in the corner of the screen, my boss Gary's name in the box. It was a private message. Private messages from the boss are rarely good things.

Swallowing, I read what Gary sent.

"Did you touch the Varvox yesterday?" it said.

I stared at the screen, baffled about what he was talking about.

Yesterday. I could think of only one thing.

I typed, "You're talking about that thing on Victor's desk, right?"

Pause.

"Did you touch it?" came the response.

I typed no.

Ten minutes passed without Gary sending me anything, so I closed the box, assuming we were done.

Figuring the lack of response was a good thing, I returned my attention to the relentless stream of phone calls.

Phone service restoration. Trying to squeeze payments out of customers who refused to pay anything.

"What's a Varvox?" I texted. Gary gave me no answer.

Since it was break time, I decided it a good time to check the parking lot for Snaker's car. It wasn't there. It was annoying to have to keep checking outside all the time like that, but it wasn't like I had his phone number.

When I returned to the building and got a cup of coffee, I found the strange woman seated at a break room table, typing something on a laptop.

Still confused about our exchange on the day previous, I tapped her on the shoulder.

"You stopped and spoke to me earlier," I said. "But it was all gibberish. I don't get it. Is this some kind of game?"

She just chuckled and shook her head. "If it's gibberish, why do you keep communicating to me with it?"

"Cute," I said. "But I'm not talking about English."

"Neither am I," she said. "And we certainly aren't speaking it right now."

When it finally dawned on me that our lips weren't forming English syllables, I backed away in horror. She only laughed and folded up her laptop, waking away.

My mind was full of questions and unrest, but there was nothing I could do about it. I finished my coffee and got back on the phone.

After explaining to yet another customer that their payment for phone equipment actually applied to their past due balance instead of actual phone service, I typed a message in the main employee chat room.

"Does anyone know what a Varvox does?"

Long pause. I figured the others were on other calls.

I did a phone reactivation, then sent someone else to customer service to change their calling plan.

"I don't know what you're talking about," someone with the handle MLarson wrote.

"Sounds like a brand of vodka," someone else wrote.

Another message said, "I think they were trying to say `Firefox'."

I saw Harry turn in his chair, replying to the message verbally. "Did you see the invisible man using it?"

"It sounds like one of those Avaya teleconferencers," Sam typed. "It's probably an external mic for a phone."

I wrote "maybe."

"Either that, or it could be a new type of mouse, or an external storage device."

Nobody else wrote anything.

A rude customer was serious entitlement delusions called in, smugly demanding his late fees waived for no good reason, so I put him on hold for over a minute. Asshole tax, I thought as he typed in the chat again.

"I saw this thing on Victor's desk. It was triangular and it had buttons on it. Gary called it a Varvox but he wouldn't tell me what it did."

Another long silence.

As it neared lunch time, and I was frantically typing memos on a previous customer's account while speaking to a new one about something equally complicated, I saw a light flashing on his monitor, this one reading GWarren.

"Log into AUX 4 and come see me," the message said.

AUX 4 is a code we put in the telephone to tell it we're busy and cannot take phone calls. Plus it tells payroll when you worked and when you took your unpaid lunch. When I was first hired as a trainee, I didn't use the AUX function at all, and some naive customer actually waited a full ten to fifteen minutes for me to pick up the phone.

Aux 4. Back office.

Great, I thought. What did I do now?

My mind ran over the possibilities. Did I mess up a call? Did I tell a customer the wrong thing? Did I mess up an account?

"I told you I didn't touch the thing," I typed. It was a stretch, but it was my only guess, considering his earlier messages.

"We'll talk about it," Gary replied.

Why the back office? I thought, but I knew it was no use trying to get answers from Gary when he was like this.

I tried to log into Aux 4, but a call came in and it was a long one about billing issues.

I told him I was stuck, but would go back to meet him ASAP.

The customer argued that she paid on time every month on time, and shouldn't be punished for it, when she actually paid her bills a month late,and had been paying a month late for over a year. It took ten minutes for me to get that point across to her, and still it ended up being escalated to a supervisor. Only then could I escape my phone and comply with Gary's request.

"Sorry. I'm done," I typed.

He replied, "That's fine. Come see me and Christina in the back office."

Christina.

That doesn't sound good.

Gary never involved the head department manager in something unless I did something that could possibly result in me being fired.

I cringed.

With my shoulders slumped, and my head low, I nervously stumbled to the dreaded corner office with the glass window and the square metal desk with the fake wood top, avoiding eye contact with the frowning supervisors.

My skinny African American boss was leaning against a marker board along the back wall, the fluorescents glinting off his glasses. Ordinarily Gary is cool, but this situation set me on edge.

Christina is a young, severe looking blonde with long hair. She was always well dressed. Gold necklace, turquoise inlaid silver earrings, tasteful business attire, sharp white blouse with a vest.

We never met, except in bad circumstances. I frequently got in trouble with her at the previous department for sending poorly worded e-mails to customers and businesses. After the department closed, we met again when she didn't like my employee chat messages. I promised her I wouldn't send anything unless I had to, but I thought questions about Victor's device were fairly innocent. Maybe not.

Maybe, just maybe, she intended to fire me for keeping my chat messages purely cold and business-like.

Gary waved at a gray swivel chair on the employee side of the desk. "Have a seat."

And so I plopped into the ergonomic padding, staring at the fake grain in the simulation wood desk top.

I glanced up at Christina's chubby white face for a moment to read her expression, then looked down again.

"Gary tells me you touched the Varvox."

I frowned, shaking my head. "No. I didn't touch it. I just looked at it."

A long pause followed this. I saw Gary and Christina exchanging knowing looks.

"And what did you see?"

I described it.

Another pause.

"What do you think it does?" Gary asked.

"I don't know," I stammered. "I guess it's some sort of...conferencing tool. Sam said it could be a storage device or a mouse. Is that why I'm in here? Why is that important?"

Pause.

"Just a moment."

I saw Christina march over to Gary, whispering something to him.

"Stay here," Gary said, and the two left him in the room.

I found it a tremendous relief that they were pulling me aside over something that nobody could logically fire someone about. The only thing that annoyed me was that my unscheduled break had to be done in the manager's office, where the coffee had to be purchased on the honor system, and I wasn't supposed to leave my chair.

I stared at the papers obscuring the faux oak surface; something about proprietary equipment, a disciplinary action form, and a handful of other threatening documents, deciding not to touch them for fear of making matters worse.

A sheet written in an unreadable foreign script tantalized me, but I resisted the temptation to pick it up.

The two managers re-entered the room with Gary looking a bit sheepish, Christina looking very cold and stern.

Christina's icy gaze bore straight through me as her mouth opened and words came out.

"At sprint we take our proprietary systems and software very seriously. We do not want this information leaking to our competitors, and for this reason we have kept all information about the new Varvox a secret from all entry level employees such as yourself. We don't want AT&T or Verizon learning about our new phone systems, so we found the best way to do this is not tell frontline employees about it until we already had it in use and in stores. Now that you have been exposed to the product, you present a substantial risk to the financial security of this company. Because of this, we're going to ask you to sign a non-disclosure agreement."

She pulled out a sheet of paper, sliding it over the table with an accompanying pen.

As I stared at the sheet for a minute, I Gary say, "The form basically states that you agree to keep any and all information about the Varvox a secret, and to not mention it to friends, family or (ahem) other coworkers, or face automatic termination and possible legal charges."

I could feel my face flush red. "How was I supposed to know I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about it?"

"It doesn't matter," said Christina. "We have the situation under control. So if you'd just sign and date this form near the bottom..."

I frowned at her. "Otherwise you'll not only fire me, but you'll also sue me?"

Gary sucked in his breath. "In a manner of speaking..."

"Only if you violate the terms of this agreement," Christina said with more finality.

"What do you mean, `in a manner of speaking'?"

"Well..." Gary stammered. "You won't need to worry about that if you don't tell anyone about the Varvox."

Christina glanced at Gary, then turned her cold stare back to me.

I stared at the terms with bewilderment. It seemed to be saying something about reporting negatively to other employers. "You want me to sign something that allows you to blackball me?"

"Again, it's only if you don't follow the terms of the agreement."

I eyed her with suspicion. "This doesn't seem legal."

Gary sighed. "Do you want this job or not?"

Christina crossed her arms. "You can either sign the paper, or we can walk you out the door right now. Technically you have breached confidential business security by disclosing it to other employees. That's not something you want on your permanent record when you're out job hunting."

Dead silence.

The tension ran thick as they tensely waited for me to sign the paper. I scowled at the table.

It wasn't fair, I thought. I felt like suing them, but I had no lawyer, not enough money to get one, and nowhere else to go. I simply couldn't afford to sue the second biggest phone company in America.

I grabbed the paper and signed.

Christina took the paper away. "Thank you. You may go now."

Gary looked at his watch. "Isn't it about time for your lunch?"

And so I walked out, retrieving my meal from the crowded refrigerator.

I didn't see "Grace" anywhere, and would not see her again until the situation with the fender bender eventually came to a head.

As I sat in the break room, eating some rice and a bit of fish from last night's dinner, I took out a piece of paper, writing a note to the owner of the Snaker car.

I found Harry standing in his usual favorite spot, by the window, with a plastic bottle of homemade tea in hand, staring out the glass at whatever wildlife that happened to go by the parking lot.

Without turning, he said, "Gary told me what that thing was. Sam was right. It's for conferencing. It's just a microphone or something."

"Yeah," I stammered, leaving Harry to silently sip his tea.

"See any more invisible men?"

I frowned. "No."

My anxious worry about Snaker must have been visible on my face, for then he asked, "Are you feeling all right?"

"Yeah," I sighed. "Maybe I'm just tired."

"I have a cousin who's into parapsychology. You know, studying ghosts. She got in the paper one time. I think she's even published a book about it."

At the moment, I couldn't have cared less. "Huh. That's interesting."

"It takes talent to photograph them, but she's really good at it."

I only said "Hmm", glumly stuffing food in my mouth.

Once I finished eating, I gathered up as much courage as I could, marching out the double security door in search of the Trans Am.

I looked high and low, but still didn't see it among the rows of parked cars. I saw a car that looked similar to it, but that one didn't look dirty enough to be the one, and the license plate was wrong, so I went back inside.

When I returned to my desk, I saw no new activity in the chat, save for the usual banalities like "$200 payment, $$$."

And so the usual grind resumed. Lots of promises, sporadic payments, and lots of phone activations.

Bills, payment disputes, some guy trying really hard to get account information he wasn't allowed to have.

I took my final break for the day, checking the parking lot once more. No sign of the Trans Am.

When I came back, I found everyone had been assigned a training module. Another lame Power Point thing that told you all about the features on a new phone they were selling, without any details about what that does on the billing end. Pointless.

I wasn't sure why this device was okay to talk about, but the other one would ruin my chances at getting a job forever. That being said, I didn't mention it to anyone for fear that their threats would be carried out. Instead, I just silently completed the module and read a book while my neighbors in the other cubicles chewed the fat.

When my shift ended, I gathered my belongings and walked out, checking the lot one last time.

At last I saw the car.

The moment I'd tucked the note in a secure looking crack in Snaker's window, I felt my face slamming against the hot metal hood, my arm twisted painfully behind my back.

I saw a white glint, then noticed something sharp pressing against my neck.

A brown hand jabbed a finger at my car.

"That's your piece of shit yellow Corolla over there, isn't it, motherfucker?"

I swallowed and nodded.

"You know, it was just yesterday when I was thinking, `You know, I sure as hell hope that that dumb bastard with the yellow paint job doesn't do something stupid like try to get away with leaving my front fender headlight all fucked up, especially since we're working in the same damn building.' Judging by that bitty ass piece of paper you stuck in my window, it seems that my preliminary assumption is correct."


	6. Chapter 6: Sapmux blood

The knife had an unusual scimitar-like shape to it, with gold inlay, more like a valuable collectible than something you'd want to press against someone's throat.

"You know what I'm holding to your neck, motherfucker?"

I stammered no.

"This here is a Crysknife! Made from a genuine giant assed Arrakeen sandworm tooth! Legend has it that you can't resheathe this thing without whetting it with some kind of human blood. The question is, am I going to be putting a dab on it, or a whole fucking lot?"

"What do you want?" I gasped.

The guy had intolerable body odor, like he'd just spent hours sweating in a gym before coming to work to assault me. I didn't want to breathe more than I had to.

"Just the usual shit. Insurance information. That kind of thing. I wouldn't recommend any sudden moves. I'd hate to get blood all over my hood." He pulled me to my feet, shoving me against the windshield.

With one hand pressing the blade against the soft part of my neck, he reached up with his free hand, reading my note.

I sweated as I stared at the tattoos on the dark muscular arms that pinned me down.

"Jason Finch," he read. "Tweet tweet."

Feeling my assailant's grip relaxing, I tried to wiggle free, but the stranger noticed.

"Dammit! Didn't you hear a single word I said, motherfucker? Or do you have some kind of death wish?"

"Look, I gasped. "I'll pay for the damages. I wanted to do that anyway. Please. Please put that knife away."

Now he was breathing down my neck. "What, no insurance?"

"I got some," I gasped. "I don't want the premium to go up."

I felt the Crysknife pressing close to my skin. "Tell you what. You're going to pay my repair bill. Your crappy little car broke my front headlight and damaged the bumper, and I want it fixed. Got it?"

I would have nodded, but I didn't want to slice my own throat. "Yes," I cried. "How much do you want?"

The brown hand relaxed a little, slightly lowering the knife. "I'll have to get back to you on that. Is that phone number and other shit correct on this little note?"

I didn't want to "bleed a whole fucking lot", as he said, so I refrained from asking why the size of the paper really mattered. Instead, I just cried that I would do whatever he said.

"All right, then. I guess I'll have to tell you tomorrow."

The knife dropped away from view.

I stared at the stranger, finally getting a good look at him.

The guy reminded me of skinny killer aliens I've seen in science fiction movies, except he was completely terrestrial, like some absurd combination of an Ethiopian and a bulldog.

His bald shaven head reminded me somewhat of a football turned on its side. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes set deep in his skull, framed in dark circles, and there were bags beneath each one.

His loose hanging sleeveless sports jersey revealed a musculature like that of a basketball player. Lean, wiry arms that could just as easily kill instead of shoot free throws.

"Shit," the man said with a laugh. "I almost forgot."

I yelped in pain as I felt something sharp slicing into my neck.

"Damn, dawg! I forgot! There's still some Sapmux blood on that! Fuuuck, I'm sorry!"

"What!" I practically screamed at him. "What did you do?"

"I can't legally tell you what it is, but you might want to get a doctor to check that out. My bad. I'm sorry."

I frowned. "I think we crossed that `legal' line when you pulled a knife on me."

His eyes narrowed. "Now who did the hit and run, exactly? Don't make me pull my knife out again."

I swallowed. "That's fine. Whatever. Are we done? I think my neck's bleeding."

Snaker laughed. "Yeah. We done. I'll call you tomorrow or something."

Shaking my head, I ran back to the building, rushing into the restroom.

After soaking some paper towels and cleaning out the wound, I examined the cut in the mirror.

It seemed to only be a surface cut, a hair thin incision that didn't appear to touch anything vital. But it bled profusely, just the same. I held another paper towel to it, wondering when the bleeding would stop.

What the hell is a Sapmux anyway? I wondered.

Noting that the bleeding had showed signs of stopping, I grabbed a wad of paper towels, and got in my car.

I was able to drive with only slight difficulty, driving one handed for a few miles as I changed paper towels and checked to see if the towel was clean of blood. About ten minutes later, the bleeding seemed to stop, and I had uninterrupted use of both hands.

At last I arrived at my house.

The moment I stepped through the door, father said, "What happened to your neck?"

I used to go to karate, but I had stopped attending, or practicing. I really didn't want to be forced back into it by this ugly incident. It was bad enough when this kind of thing happened in high school.

"I..." I stammered. "I...fell down the stairs at work."

He frowned at me, but didn't comment.

My mother, who had been trimming the struggling dog's nails on the couch to him, let out a sharp hiss when she saw me. Sucking in her breath, she set down the clippers and poked the area around my neck. "That looks like a knife wound! What really happened?"

"I told you. I fell on the stairs. There was something sharp lying on one of the steps."

I could tell by her facial expression that she didn't buy it. "You should go to the hospital."

"No, it'll be fine. It's just a surface cut."

"It was the owner of that car you hit, wasn't it?" Dad growled.

I just gave him a pained glance. I really didn't want to go down this road with him.

"You should press charges against him. Call the police on him."

I shook my head. "Technically, I did a hit and run. I don't have much ground to stand on."

"But he cut you! That's not legal!"

"So is a hit and run. I don't want to report him because then he'll report on me. I don't want to get arrested."

"Oh you're so silly. You won't get arrested."

"Okay. Fined, then."

"You've got to report him."

"Look. I don't even know his name, okay? I just know him as Snaker."

"But you can point him out in a lineup, right?"

"No, I didn't actually get a good look at his face."

She sighed and shook her head. "We put you in those karate classes for a reason."

"I know..."

"`Turn the other cheek'," Father sneered. "He's such a religious zealot that he lets everyone walk all over him. We all that money sending him through karate lessons and he doesn't even use it."

"We should sign him up again."

I swallowed. Karate isn't a hobby. It's a lifestyle. You can't do what the instructors want unless you devote huge amounts of your personal time practicing. Where would I have time for things that I wanted to do?

"I don't have time for that," I cried.

Why did I let myself get attacked? Because I was daydreaming at the time, and didn't expect someone to attack me from behind. That's why. And maybe because I am unhappy with the way my life is going, and didn't care.

"Don't have time? What the hell are you doing besides making those dribblings in your room?"

I shook my head in frustration, thinking about how I'd have to reduce my life to nothing but work, karate and sleep. I shuddered as I remembered spending hours in his cramped basement practicing elaborate dances that seemed to do nothing to do with self defense.

"It'll be fine!" I shouted.

"Yes! You'll be fine once we sign you back up for karate!"

"Dammit, no! Listen!" I yelled. Then, not wanting to offend my dad by raising my voice again, I blurted, "The guy will leave me alone once I pay him the damage."

Mom clicked her tongue and shook her head. "You're really scaring me. I hope everything will turn out all right..."

"`Turn the other cheek'," Dad spat. "That money was a waste!"

So I own a brown belt. So what.

I only have health insurance because Uncle Sam forces me to. I'd much rather take my chances with death.

Twenty eight and still living with my parents.

A college degree in art, but no career, just a lame customer service job unrelated to the field of art.

No girlfriend. No wife.

Embarrassing sleepwalking problems.

I should have let my neck bleed.

With a frustrated sigh, I stomped upstairs, searching for bandages. When I couldn't find the right kind, I called mom up to help, but she brought me gauze and a maxi pad.

"I'm not wearing that," I protested.

"What. It absorbs blood."

I frowned at her.

"You don't have to wear it outside."

I groaned in frustration. "I'm not doing that. Is there something else I can use instead?"

Rolling her eyes, she brought me some paper towels.

Sighing, I dressed the wound with the items, backing in my room to avoid further embarrassment.

After illustrating an excessively violent series of comic illustrations, I came down and cooked supper. It wasn't fish this time, but dad wasn't upstairs, so I had to go tell him it was time to eat.

He liked to fast a lot. He'd be so obsessed with working on something that he'd get angry when we suggested eating a meal, but then he would eat a raw hot dog or a box of donuts some time later.

I dreaded going into the basement. Dad spent all day and night on the computer chasing down phantom viruses, downloading programs and trying ineffectively to type the wrong product keys into the wrong programs. I'd spent hours trying to help him get the icons on an LP recording program to appear on his desktop, but after an hour of trying, dad "solved" the problem by ordering yet another copy of the same exact program. I shuddered to think what would happen to my mother's credit card.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up with a 100,000 bill as an inheritance, of that I feel certain.

I once told mother about my concerns, but it only resulted in dad being ridiculous and telling me he wasn't spending any money each and every time he entered the basement. Yet he would enter his credit card on all kinds of websites a week later.

This time he was doing a virus scan because the icons on his computer were too large for him to see the dirty pictures. After spending about eight minutes discovering that it was a simple operation you did with a right mouse click, we marched up to the dining room.

As we ate, dad started back in on griping about me getting attacked, and mom joined in. They sounded like broken records, beating the proverbial dead horse in a vast variety of different ways while I just silently glared at the table.

After too much thought on my part, I at last came across a solution. I talked shop.

They lost interest, eating silently as they watched TV.

Once done with the meal, I set about the usual activities, washing the dishes with an SOS pad to humor my father and compensate for the empty sink and dishwasher.

Dad noticed me doing this and he started to gripe about that again. "I'll just wash it again in the dish washer!" he grumbled. At least we weren't talking about karate anymore.

He got so annoyed that he kicked me out of the kitchen.

When I touched the makeshift bandage on my neck, I noticed that it was wet with blood. I wanted to check my bathroom for additional bandages, but Troy, my brother, was in the way.

He had to have his ritual, one where he tied up both the upstairs hallway and the bathroom with his scalding hot water and industrial sized bottle of antibacterial soap.

While the water ran in the empty bathroom, he'd bolt out into the hallway, soaping up his hands with an inconveniently positioned two liter bottle of antibacterial soap. This ritual took roughly eight or ten minutes.

Frustrated, I sat down on a recliner and stared at an NCIS marathon.

Imagine my surprise when, after pulling out the footrest, I uncovered a homemade bow and a quiver of arrows hidden beneath the mechanism.

I quickly shoved them deeper in the chair and folded the footrest down.

I pretended I hadn't seen it, thinking I would go a day without a mentioning of my weird sleepwalking habits, but then, the moment I heard the dishwasher coming to life, I see dad holding up a crude wreath made from wire, sweetgum balls, and some kind of animal bones.

"Is this one of your art projects, or were you sleepwalking again?"

Not wanting to go the head shrinker again, I lied and said it was an art project.

"Why was this in the dishwasher?"

I swallowed. "I...wanted it to be really clean."

Dad frowned at me, but he seemed to believe it. After all, one time I left a Target poster out in the rain and dirt and laminated it.

"If you break the dishwasher, you're buying us a new one," he growled. And then he walked away.

My brother finished up, so I was finally able to go to the bathroom.

I looked in my medicine cabinet, but didn't see any bandages in there, so I checked the one in mom's bathroom.

Noticing my predicament, mom handed me the bandages she had, small finger bandages not designed for a horizontal neck wound, but I decided to put three of them on anyways, to keep the wound closed.

I spent the rest of the evening waiting for the wound to heal as I went about my normal activities.

The next morning when I woke up, I found a crude map of my neighborhood carved into my closet door, complete with markings I could only assume to be street names, or descriptions. None of it was in English.

Not too terribly surprised, I shrugged it off, preparing myself for work.

I drove to the building with a bandage on my neck.

With my checkbook in pocket, ready to pay the damages on Snaker's car, I searched the parking lot, but in vain. Seeing no car, I could only assume that the creep worked the evening shift and carry on my business as usual.

It was an average work day aside from people asking why I had the bandage.

Afraid that the Snaker guy had friends, I lied and said I was trying my hand at wood carving. When someone questioned the excuse, I told them I had an accident while helping dad with a construction project in the basement. When pressed further, I told them the circular saw slipped at the same time I did, and I was lucky it didn't cut an artery.

I got looked at funny when I said this, probably because it implied abuse. It shut them up, at any rate.

I guess I accidentally threw my dad under the bus with that one, but it was either that or getting a second cut.

I felt normal as I stepped into the building that day, like the wound on my neck had been a mere paper cut or something.

Okay, so maybe I was lying to myself, forcing myself not to pay attention to that funny twinge in my neck, or the odd spasms occurring from time to time.

I thought I felt fine when I took the first call, but after the third and forth ones, I began to feel a tightness in my chest, like I wasn't getting enough oxygen.

My heart raced erratically, thundering out of control, regardless of how many deep breaths I took.

Desperate for a medical answer, I Googled Sapmux on my computer, but only found a website full of randomly assembled letters advertising cheap prescription Cialis. Likewise, a search for the Crysknife only brought up a Frank Herbert fan page.

Convinced I had instead contracted tetanus, I researched the facts on that one instead.

A caller came in as I was reading about the jaw stiffness and difficulty swallowing, two things I actually was experiencing.

I slopped through the, gasping for air, without the slightest concern for collecting a payment or keeping a perfect script.

I kept thinking, _I'm going to die. I'm going to die_.

Fever and rapid heart rate. Check.

I felt dizzy. Light headed. I felt like I had difficulty breathing.

Someone behind me was talking about a girl who got fired for cussing on the phone. Apparently, just an hour before, during an informal potluck I had not been invited to, she had made everybody hold hands and join her in a table prayer. As amusing as it all was, I was not in a mood for mirth.

When I clutched my chest, nobody seemed to have the slightest concern. They were too busy taking calls.

Throughout the whole time, nobody around me had bothered to say a word about my condition. I supposed they would have noticed if I fell on the floor, but not until then. Besides, how long would _that_ have taken?

As I continued addressing customers, I felt my pulse fluctuate, heart rate increasing to a point where I felt the need to get more and more air.

I'd experienced these heart palpitations before, so I figured I could just wait for it to pass, as I'd done previously. After all, it wasn't frequent, normally only one time per year, if that.

I used my inhaler, but all it did was make me see stars.

I kept telling myself it was nothing. That I'd just look like a hypochondriac slob who randomly calls in sick whenever there's a sunny day outside.

I leaned against his desk like an overweight coronary patient, fighting to keep up the professional facade as I felt life slipping away from me. Each call felt like an eternity as my pulse thundered in my head.

"I don't have an attitude problem." I heard someone saying loudly. "I don't. Ma'am, you didn't let me finish. I said I don't have an attitude problem. You're the one with an attitude." After a pause, she continued. "Ma'am, if you don't like my attitude, you can hang up right now."

I was Zia, in the row behind me.

Zia seemed to spend a great deal more time on the carpet talking than she did sitting in her seat taking calls. On the phone, she was rude. Off the phone, she alternated between telling her life story, preaching about Jesus, and participating in discussions about the thirty eight sexual positions.

How she kept her job was a mystery.

Occasionally, she'd eat a handful of baby powder and complain about her phosphorus deficiency.

She was black, sounded and acted like an old lady, but had not a shred of gray hair, and she considered Kanye West "classical R&B".

As I felt the end of my life drawing nearer and nearer, the thought occurred to me that all the work I did for the company was meaningless, and that all the polite, quality customer service I had provided will simply disappear, replaced by Zia, and no one will care.

Well, I was dying. I didn't care, either.

Nothing mattered. Not even the stupid animal cartoons I'd spent half my life working on. Up to this point, my art hadn't seen the light of day, and it seemed it never would. What had I gotten for posting nine hundred comic pages on those art websites? Nothing. A few compliments here and there. Complaints. I wasted my life.

As thoughts about dying from a heart attack filled my mind, I handled the calls with only the slightest concern for customer satisfaction. I could see myself dying while talking to the customer. Great employee to the end, they'd say. He stayed at his post to the very end.

I kept thinking about the scene in Wrath of Khan where James Doohan discovers the corpse of the chief engineer and praises him for sticking to his job. "He stayed at his post when the others left."

"I'm calling about my bill," said a voice on the phone. "Why are these charges so high?"

I wheezed through the details of the man's bill with careless detachment, hoping against hope that he'd leave me in peace.

My neck throbbed like something were trying to get out.

I went to the bathroom to assess the damage.

It seemed the wound had worsened. What had begun as a narrow red slit now hung open like a flap, as if I had suddenly grown a single gill on the right side of my neck.

I shuddered, applying fresh bandages to it.

I returned to the phones, trying to do my job the best I could. I figured if it were the last thing I'd ever do, I should make it count.

When the next caller came on the phone, I tried to push him off the phone as quickly as I could, but he was a bore that liked to complain, so I clammed up and let him blabber on and on endlessly until he realized I wasn't reacting. Talking took too much effort anyway, so I just dully let his words wash over me as meaningless sound.

The instant messenger informed me of a tornado alert. "Everyone log out of your phones," it said.

Relieved, I hit the After Call button, fighting a bit more strongly to get the customer off the phone without telling him about the tornado. About five long minutes later, I succeeded, logging out of the phone.

"Go to the meeting room," the message had said.

Meeting room? I thought as I got up. Which meeting room?

Taking nothing with me, I turned and followed after some straggling employees.

The meeting room stood in a back hallway, a stuffy, dirty little unused room with no windows and a dozen barren desks and broken swivel chairs. The air was stale and didn't seem to circulate.

This reprieve from the phones offered me no comfort.

I seated myself, regarding my fellow tornado refugees with a dull glassy stare.

While the people around me listened to their weather radios and cel phones, I just gazed at them, thinking they'd be the last faces I'd ever see, and nobody seemed to care that my chest felt tight and my heartbeat felt irregular.

A blonde girl sat on the floor next to me, watching a tornado report on her phone. A bald black guy with a wide fish mouth stood and watched Christina as she plugged in a weather radio, setting it on a chair.

The sounds of chattering coworkers and monotone weather announcers flooded into my ears as trifling noise. The passing minutes felt like years crawling by.

"What's wrong with your neck?" a dark skinned girl with slicked back hair asked as she stared at me.

The girl's face reminded me of an African idol. Brown coloration, elongated features, hair pinned up in back, eyebrows set in a permanent glare like some kind of Vulcan, similar to the Voodoo-esque wooden salad set my mom got for an anniversary present.

She wore a dark jacket with a bunchy waist, a blouse, and tight charcoal leggings that didn't appear to be dress code approved.

I tried not to think about that last part, since it would not only hasten my trip to my maker, but also leave me with a lot of explaining to do before said maker.

"It's nothing," I forced myself to say.

I still felt like I couldn't get enough air, and speaking stole precious oxygen.

"I just...cut myself somehow...this morning. Shaving. It's fine."

I didn't feel like telling the whole story. Not enough air, and she probably didn't care anyway.

My pulse still hadn't slowed.

"Okay!" the girl said in a sing-songy tone.

She shrugged and took out her cel phone. The same brand I collected payments on all day.

While grateful not to be on a call, I had absolutely nothing to occupy my thoughts except my mortality. No books or games or anything.

The minutes crept by with agonizing slowness, filled with the sounds of coworkers I had little or no attachment to, chatting amongst themselves or breathlessly absorbing the radio reports spewing out of the mouths of bored weathermen.

I stood up, hoping it would slow my racing pulse to a tolerable level.

As I stood with my coworkers staring at me, it felt like the entire room had been grabbed by the tornado, rapidly rotating around me in a blur.

With a faint moan, I clutched his pounding chest, falling to the floor.

Silvery specks swam across my field of vision as I heard a voice asking me if I were enjoying himself down there on the carpet.

The room, the building, changed colors, from purple to green to orange and then like a sickly washed out photograph of reality.

The events which followed came to me in a muted fog.

Worried coworkers standing over me.

Gary's face leaning over my head, asking if I'm all right, but I couldn't answer the question coherently.

Other people asking the same question.

"You want me to call 9-1-1?" I heard Christina asking.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea, " Gary muttered. "Look at that wound. If the EMT's see that discoloration and swelling, there's going to be some questions."

"What do you suggest, then?"

He shrugged. "Let's take him down to the lab and see what Sally can do for him."

Discoloration and swelling? I thought. Lab? Sally? Why can't they let an EMT look at me? What the hell is going on?

Sadly, I was feeling too bad to resist.

Still half out of it, I flailed my arms in a pathetic attempt to escape as they grabbed my shoulders and feet, carrying me out the door.

I thought I heard the girl in the bunchy jacket asking about me, but Gary just said I was having an epileptic fit combined with a panic attack, and I just needed to lay down.

I guess I was making random outbursts during this episode, because she asked about the strange sounds I was making. Gary replied that I was delirious.

However, I overheard Christina muttering about "informing Grace about the tongues."

I blacked out.


	7. Chapter 7: DOGOS

When I awoke, I found myself lying naked on a padded bench in some big decompression tank.

The place reminded me of a submarine, a big cylindrical structure lined with pipes and gauges, and, oddly enough, a LCD plasma TV. The whole chamber had a faint, lingering smell of vomit.

It was cold. About seventy degrees or less. And I could see every goosepimple on my body.

I wasn't sure why I was naked. I didn't know if it were simply another sleepwalking incident, or if I had been stripped.

Seeing my clothing tossed haphazardly on floor near a submarine hatch, I climbed off the bench, staggering sideways as the room started spinning.

Once I'd spent a full five minutes leaning against a wall, my vertigo cleared a bit, and I could finally make myself decent.

Fully clothed, I sat down on the bench, staring at my surroundings.

There wasn't much to look at. Just a bunch of rusty pipes. The walls were a flat gray, and there were no windows anywhere.

After about ten minutes, I'd practically memorized every bolt, screw and rivet. I laid back on the mattress, staring up at the concave ceiling.

I didn't get it. I just got poisoned by a psycho with a knife. Why wouldn't they let me out of there?

I felt the urge to go to the bathroom, an urge that got worse as I lay there and waited for someone to get me out, but no one came, and I didn't see a toilet anywhere.

It felt like it were sometime after lunch. Normally I could go about that long without a toilet break, but not much longer. I'm not the crude sort that pees on walls, so I felt I had to get out soon.

I tried the door, but the giant wheel only turned a few degrees before making a noisy clank and stopping.

I returned to the bench and stared at the TV.

Sportscenter, I thought. Why did it have to be Sportscenter?

I didn't see a remote anywhere, so I passed the time staring at it, dully absorbing facts about retirements and sports injuries until Jim Rome came on and started talking about basketball.

I laid down and stared at the screen long enough to start wondering why Jim Rome's right ear looked so misshapen.

The television program had changed at least three times already, but I couldn't gauge time with it because I didn't watch ESPN enough to memorize the lineup, and I didn't know how to convert Eastern Standard time to Central.

I watched a boring documentary on the inventors of a protein bar, then something about a successful female Hispanic politician, but didn't want to sleep for fear of peeing on myself.

Hearing someone knocking on metal, I walked over to the hatch, eagerly hoping that somebody would open it.

"Hello?"

"Are you decent?" a voice called.

"Yeah!" I yelled back.

I heard the sounds of something clanking, and then the submarine door swung open, revealing a bald narrow figure with sloping shoulders, with a stack of white card stock in his hand.

Gary.

My manager's slack features reflected no surprise or amusement, as if he handled situations like this all the time.

I could tell by Gary's farwaway looks that he had selected the channel.

"You're lucky they didn't shred your clothes," Gary said as he marched over to the bench. "These guys are licensed paramedics."

He laughed.

I just gawked at him.

Gary straightened the stack of paper. "I'm going to show you a series of pictures," he said, raising the top sheet on the stack. "I want you to tell me what they are."

I stared at the paper. It looked like a photograph of a wallpaper stain. "What do you see?"

I rolled my eyes. "An inkblot test? Seriously?"

"I want to know if you're disoriented or brain damaged in any way. Humor me."

I frowned. "It's ugly wallpaper."

"Yes, but what does the ugly wallpaper look like?"

"A boat with a face on it. It has a hat."

"Good." He flashed another card.

"Venus de Milo with a happy face for a head."

He showed me another.

"A mouse with a baseball cap, and a pipe for a body."

For the next one, I said, "The letter E."

He looked at me with this shocked expression that made me wonder if he planned to attempt medical treatment. "Is that really what you see?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, but I keep thinking it's an E, even when it's shaped wrong."

"Just free associate and tell us what you think it is."

"It's the letter E."

He shook his head, setting the cards down.

"This place smells like puke," I said.

"Oh right," he laughed. "Sometimes we put Vincent in here when he gets too much to drink."

I rolled my eyes.

"I've got some bad news, I'm afraid," he said.

He just left that sentence hanging.

I stared at him in horror. "I'm going to die?"

He burst out laughing. "No. No, Jason. You're not going to die."

He propped a foot up on the rubber mattress, leaning on his leg. "Look, uh, you're not really supposed to know about some of the stuff that you know about, and that's...not good. So, uh, you're going to have to stay here for a few days."

I swallowed, gawking at him. "Are you kidding?"

Gary responded also by swallowing, then shook his head. "I'm really sorry about this, but you've been exposed to some..._information_ of a sensitive nature, and I have to take this matter up with H.R., which unfortunately won't be in until Wednesday. If you have any relatives or _significant others_ that might be worrying about you, I can give you a phone, but you're going to have to promise not to mention anything about our operation."

I narrowed my eyes. "What's there to tell? Some nut sliced my neck open with some kind of poisoned knife, and you're very secretive with your telephone equipment."

Gary stared at me, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "All right. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give you a phone to use to call..._whoever you want_ and tell them you're okay."

_Significant others. Whoever I want._ His choice of words and the tone of his voice seemed to be implying that I was a queer.

"Any calls you make will be recorded," he continued. "If I hear one word about anything..._unusual_...It'll be the last call you'll be making for a very long time."

"What?" I said. "You'll kill me?"

He chuckled. "No, but you'll find that things will quickly become a lot more _unusual_, as you'll be spending a terrific amount of quality time down here."

I frowned. "Let's say I accidentally blab something. I'm not saying I will, but what if something slips out and I don't realize I...violated the agreement until it's too late?"

Gary shrugged. "It all depends on what you blabbed. We'll figure out what disciplinary measures to take once we evaluate the severity of the breach."

I was about to open my mouth to ask another question, but Gary interrupted me. "Keep in mind that your actions don't just affect you. If we find that the person you're contacting has learned something they're not supposed to, they're not going to be the same when we're finished with them."

I gulped. "What are you going to do to them?"

Gary coughed. "Nothing if you can keep your mouth shut. I really don't want to do anything if I don't have to. But we have in in the past given certain people a..._bit of amnesia. _They kinda forgot to pay the light bill and their kid stayed at daycare the whole night."

I laughed, but Gary looked completely serious.

It didn't seem so funny anymore.

"Do I get paid overtime for this?" I asked.

Gary frowned. "Technically, we have to, which makes this situation even more awkward."

"Well that's good. At least I'm getting paid."

"You can think that way if it makes you feel better, but you technically are on salary right now."

I rubbed my face in frustration. "Can't you, I don't know, figure out a way to resolve this faster? At least not make me sit down in this tank for a whole week?"

Gary crossed his arms. "This is a delicate situation. We can't just make a snap decision because this is going to have some very long term effects."

I slumped back in the rubber mattress. "Great."

"Hold on," Gary said, digging a cel phone out of his pocket. He dialed a number, holding the phone to his ear for a moment before shutting it off.

"Dammit. No reception."

He gave me an apologetic shrug. "I completely forgot." He sighed as he frowned at the little screen. "Hold up. I'll get you a phone."

And he walked out, shutting the door behind him.

The only thing I could figure was that he forgot to pay his bill, or his phone was truly terrible. Of course, I wasn't sure why a guy who ran a telephone collections department would forget such a thing.

After another long wait, the hatch came open again.

"All right. This will have to do," Gary said. "Come over here."

I walked to the door, staring out at the room beyond.

I saw a concrete tunnel of cinder block construction, with a shiny floor running parallel to the tank. Someone had blocked off some of the hallways with marker boards, chairs and file cabinets. Above were the standard drab corporate style ceiling tiles and fluorescents.

A long phone cord had been stretched along the shiny concrete floor, a standard Avaya phone positioned taut at the end, the cable apparently stretched to its limit.

"There you go," said Gary. "Same thing you got upstairs. Dial 9 to get the number, just like usual. Again, it's monitored."

With a sigh, I picked it up and dialed.

Although the screen was set on military time, I calculated it to be four P.M., a good two and a half hours after my shift.

"Am I getting overtime for all this?" I asked.

"Uh...we'll discuss that later once we figure out what to do with you." Gary said.

"Please tell me you're planning something legal."

Gary burst out laughing, slapping his knee. "What do you think we were going to do? Force you to saw your own leg off?"

I didn't laugh, dampening dampened Gary's mirth.

With one last forced chuckle, he said, "we're not going to hurt you."

I dialed out. Mom picked up.

Immediately after I had said hello, I noticed Gary mouthing words to me. "I'm going to be working late tonight."

'Um, listen," I told her. " I...I'm going to be a little late tonight."

"How late?"

I saw Gary cringe in response.

The phone allows you to mute a call, so I did.

I scowled at my boss. "You're not seriously going to keep me in here for a whole week, are you?"

He paused for more than a minute. "I really shouldn't be doing this, but I'll give you a break. Just this once."

I sighed in relief. "So what do I tell her, then?"

"Tell her four hours," he muttered.

I took the phone off mute. "Four hours."

I did a double take. "Four hours!" I hissed. "I'm not sitting in this isolation tank for four hours!"

"You're getting paid," Gary shrugged.

"Oh," I stammered. "Can you at least bring me the stuff from my desk?"

"Sure. What did you want me to get?"

"My coat and the backpack from the bottom drawer. Oh, and get me my lunch from the fridge. Do you have a bathroom?"

"Hold on. I'll you taken care of."

Hearing confused conversation on the other end of the phone, I said, "Sorry, mom. Yes, it's going to be four hours."

"Hello? Are you there?"

"Oh great." I took the phone off mute, repeating myself.

"Well, at least you're getting paid extra," she said.

"I hope so." I shook my head.

"All riight. By the way, we're running out of toilet paper. Can you bring some home on the way back?"

I shuddered to think what my dad was doing without any. Things could quickly get disgusting.

I hung up.

"We're trying to get this thing settled ASAP," said Gary. "Just sit tight, and we'll get you taken care of."

"Bathroom?" I prompted.

"I'll get you something for that. Hold on." And he gestured for me to get back in the chamber.

Frowning, I stepped back in and squeezed my bladder muscles, hoping I wouldn't have an accidental spill.

The door closed, and I waited. And waited.

After sitting through an entire basketball highlights program, I saw Gary lugging in an aluminum urinal with a hose trailing from the back end.

He carried this thing to a wall panel, hooking the tube to something inside the wall.

"There you go. I hope you don't need number two, because brought the wrong one for that."

"That's fine," I sighed. "Just bring my stuff down, okay? My llunch is in the fridge in the corner. It's macaroni and it's in a Gladware container."

"All right. Be back in a few."

And he shut the door.

"A few" turned out to be the length of an entire program. I used the urinal and stared at the program, absorbing more information on the Big 12 Conference than I ever wanted to know. I decided right then that I'd get a remote from him when he returned.

The hatch came open, and I saw Gary bringing all my things, my bag, my lunch and coat.

The first thing I did was dig into my cold mac and cheese, thankful to even be able to eat something.

"Won't be much longer," Gary said, walking to the door.

"Wait," I blurted. "How do you change the channel?"

But Gary was already outside, slamming the hatch shut.

With a sigh, I kept eating, digging out my book to read while I ate.

He got through the six hundredth page before Gary came in again. "Come with me."

Swallowing, I got up, following Gary out the hatch, and down the left hand tunnel, past rows of closed office doors and drab walls unadorned with anything but corporate grade number plaques and framed inspirational posters about teamwork.

Gary knocked on a door, and I found myself staring at that Augustine woman again.

She looked very stern. A sharp difference from the peppy strangeness I had encountered previously.

She let us in, Gary shutting the door with a loud click behind us.

"Have a seat," said the woman.

With a shrug, I did so.

After a long silence, whispering, and dramatic shuffling of papers, the woman said, "Mr. Finch, you are in an unfortunate situation. You've been exposed to sensitive materials relating to a project we frankly did not want you involved in. While we found your attendance record exemplary, we find the quality of your work itself only average."

Gary leaned over my chair. "Ironically enough, if we move you to a different department, Sprint will lose money. You're actually doing a decent job. At least, for what is expected at Sprint. No offense, but you're more of a `meets,' rather than `exceeds,' type of employee."

The woman nodded. "You display none of the special traits we are currently seeking for any of our positions in this department, which leaves us with a difficult decision. We don't especially want to add you to this department, but we can't easily send you on your way either."

"We can make you promise until you turn blue," said Gary. "But you're human. You're going to slip up eventually."

"So that leaves us the option of a memory wipe," said Ms. Augustine. "But the process is cost prohibitive. Especially when it could impact the way you perform at Sprint."

"The only problem is, it's not what our other client is looking for. You're going to have to...make some changes."

"Changes?" I swallowed. "Like what?"

The two manager stared at each other, Gary leaning backwards on a blackboard.

"Compared to the memory wipe," Gary said. "Training is cheap. And it has less undesirable side effects. Less stories."

"You have three options," Grace said. "One, agree to a memory wipe. Two, you join NCO-DOGOS, or three, walk away, and we'll blacklist you from every pitiful job you're actually qualified to work with."

"Which isn't much, by the way. You really can't do much with an art degree. I've seen your resume."

I paled. "What if I...falsified a few details because I'm overqualified for this job?"

Gary laughed. "Mr. Finch, if you were holding out on us, we'd know. If your social was there, we were there."

The room suddenly felt really cold.

"So...you're promoting me," I ventured.

"Not...exactly," said Gary. "Sprint still needs you on their project."

Ms. Augustine nodded. "It's more like a little side duty."

"A lateral move," Gary agreed. "We can't afford to put you on full time, so we've devised a rotating one day shift schedule where you fill in on an as needed basis."

I briefly wondered how he found the time to come up with all of this, but then I realized there might have been a reason why I had been forced to sit in that tank so long.

I still had difficulty processing all of this. "As needed?"

He only gave me a dismissive wave. "We'll fill you in on all the details later. Basically what you need to know right now is that you're going to work for a company called RPS Incorporated. That's what you'll tell anyone who asks where you work. RPS does collections for Citibank, Kohls, and an assortment of small furniture companies that have offered a line of credit cards."

I just stared at him with my mouth hanging open, not believing the ridiculous information I was being told. Furniture. Citibank. And somehow Crysknives and weird phone devices have something to do with it.

"That's the cover story."

"Oh."

Gary took a deep breath. "That's all I can tell you until orientation. You'll need to sign some non-disclosure forms and take some tests before we go any further."

"Speaking of which..." The woman slid me a stack of papers.

They were page upon page of warnings about restrictions on electronic communications, the restriction of sharing of customer account information with third parties, the usual stuff you'd be forced to sign at any customer service or collections job. No stranger to this sort of thing, I signed the familiar ones without a second's thought.

It was the unfamiliar ones that gave me trouble.

I stared at a sheet telling me I basically can't tell anyone I know about a lot of things I couldn't understand, such as the list of strangely named policies that I was supposed to "understand" before I signed the paper, the Babcock-Foster Policy being the most prevalent.

I pointed to the paper. "What's this?"

"It basically says that you are not to tell anyone about what we discussed here, or how you spent the last seven hours, or other items related to the DOGOS company."

"So what am I supposed to tell them?"

"It's your responsibility to come up with a convincing cover story. I suggest telling others outside the company that you were just working late. Technically it's true. But for the people that saw you collapse, I'd tell them you had a panic attack, and that your medication needs to be adjusted."

Shaking my head in frustration, I returned my attention to the mound of paper, squinting at the innumerable blocks of legalese until my eyes glazed over.

Giving up trying, I signed and dated all the rest of the papers.

"We'll let you know when it's time for orientation," Gary said as he picked them up. "Just continue what you were doing and we'll pull you off the phone."

He gestured to the door.

Scrunching up my face, I crept over that way, staring at him.

"Oh. Right," Gary laughed. "Let me show you out."

And so I got up, following him out to the hallway.

Muttering something about blindfolds, he led me past the doors, past some plain looking offices, then up a staircase situated right in the middle of an unoccupied grid of cubicles boxed in with fences of upholstered plywood.

I'd seen the place before. During my breaks, I sometimes would get bored and look through the little window at the end of the cramped hallway around the corner of the Sprint call center, and see this dead little office with nobody in it.

Now I knew why. It was a facade.

"Can I get my stuff?" I said as we approached the door with the little window.

"I almost forgot," Gary laughed. "Here. Let's go this way."

And so we marched back down the stairs, turning down gray corridors until we arrived at the decompression tank.

After retrieving my things, we returned to the empty call center, strolling out the door and down the narrow hallway to the Citibank call center adjacent to our office. The people there didn't know me, and only a couple remained after four, so they paid me no heed.

In the Sprint office, I noticed my regular coworkers had gone for the day. A few familiar faces still manned the phones, but they looked too busy to chat at the moment.

Gary took a deep breath. "See you tomorrow!"

"Tomorrow," I groaned.

As I at last stumbled out to my car, I again found my face being slammed against the hood of a car.

"I just got the repair estimate," a voice growled in my face. "You didn't forget our little discussion, did you?"


	8. Chapter 8: Processing

Author's note: In case anyone was wondering, I put a scene in the wrong section, so the story has been rearranged, to give it more depth.

I still have the crazy part about the flying thing on file, but I have to weave it into the story so that it actually makes sense.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I'll have to rewrite this chapter again because I've turned my room upside down and still can't find the note cards that connect some of these scenes together.

* * *

I knew it was going to happen. I just didn't think Snaker would have the patience to wait outside all day until the boss let me go.

As I felt the hot metal burning my face, I reflected that this guy had some serious trust issues.

"Relax!" I blurted. "Let me get my checkbook!"

He let go of me. "Where is it?"

I dug it out of my bag, writing him a check for the damages.

To my great relief, the bill wasn't that much. For a scary mentally imbalanced thug, he was pretty honest when it came to money.

Still, he wasn't the type of person I really wanted to hang out with. I dislike anyone prone to sudden aggressive mood swings.

When I got home, I stepped through the door with the expectation that they'd want to hear the good news about the fender bender.

Instead, my dad berated me for several minutes about carving "artwork" on my closet door. And then he told me to clean all the poop out of the garage where we keep our dogs.

Of course, I couldn't just spray the garage out. He made me go back through with a broom and a mop, and he carefully examines the floor each pass to see if I've missed any spots.

As I'm mopping, he suddenly goes outside, and he yells at me until I drop what I'm doing and go out there to help him. And then when I'm closing the garage back up, he dumps almost an entire bottle of bleach down there, to the point where I'm nearly gagging.

I'm not sure why this causes me to have a flashback. Maybe it's the fumes, but suddenly I'm seeing a group of blue figures in loincloths crouching on a rock outcrop. I stagger backwards, leaning on the staircase railing, and the vision is gone.

At last I'm done. I go about my usual business until dinner time.

Mom noticed that the cut on my neck looked a lot better than it had the day before. I guessed that was because of whatever medical technicians they had at this strange "DOGOS" place, but I really couldn't say that, so I just said that I visited the Minute Clinic on the way home.

From experience, I've learned that the only treatment that CVS clinic does is refer you to your regular doctor and tell you they can't treat you, but it was either tell her that, or tell her the wound healed on its own.

For dinner I made chili. Seeing that dad wasn't being a busybody anymore, and wasn't in front of the TV, I figured he could be in only one place, other than the bathroom.

Down in the basement, with his computer and the internet.

When I went down there to alert him about supper, I found the door locked.

I knocked and told him about supper, and he said he'd be up in a minute.

I knew from experience I didn't want to see what he was doing.

Eventually, he came up, we had supper, and I returned to my "cave."

About half an hour later, I heard him shouting, "Jason! Can you help me with something?"

With a sigh, I stepped down through the garage to the basement to see what had happened.

"I moved this folder, and now the icons are too small so I can't see what they are."

And so I showed him how to resize image icons of naked fat women. I wasn't sure I had done a good thing, or been merely acting as an enabler.

I didn't want to hang around, for obvious reasons, so I went back upstairs.

Not too long afterwards, when mom had gone to sleep, he called me down again.

Now he wanted me to help him reset his e-mail password for the thousandth time. He never could get a good grip on those passwords. Or the fact that a temporary password is supposed to be temporary.

It's likely that the reason why those scrambled internet reset pages are so unreadable when you go to get one is because they have to keep making new ones for my dad. I had to go through five of them before I could find a secret code with legible letters on it.

The worst part is being forced to not use the phone so he can be ready for those damned automated telephone password resets.

The rest of the evening was basically uneventful. For some reason, I awoke clothed, and nothing seemed to be out of place.

The next day, however, didn't seem to be real to me at all.

Right after I got in the office, I found an overturned sheet of paper sitting on my keyboard.

When I turned it over, I found only a note in tiny print saying not to log in, to report directly to the back office. So I tried to do so.

After wandering the building aimlessly and checking the wrong offices, I eventually found that the office door near the security entrance had been left open, a rarity at six A.M.

I stepped inside.

The room had no label, just a number. 3A. I'd never seen the interior of this room before. The door is normally always locked shut, and I just assumed that they only kept janitor supplies inside it.

It actually contained a small office with a desk, a computer, a drab markerboard, and shiny wooden cabinets. Both the cabinets and the walls were made of some sort of cherry colored wood, possibly mahogany.

I found a strange looking man in a white shirt and tie sitting behind the desk. He looked like an average guy, white, pointy nosed, with short cropped blonde hair, but his ears looked funny. Pointy and covered in fur, they looked like someone had grafted a German shepherd's ears to the sides of his head.

"Um, hi," I stammered.

"Jason?"

He nodded. "Yeah?"

"I'm Mr. Vuembi. I'm from H.R. Please. Have a seat."

Vuembi. It sounded African. But he didn't look African.

I nervously slipped into the chair across from the desk.

I couldn't help but grin at the funny ears.

"What's... going on?" I stammered.

"Before we begin, I need to remind you of the non-disclosure agreement. You are in no way to discuss the events of the previous day, what we were about to discuss today, or my ears, with outsiders, or risk termination and black balling."

He pushed a small packet of stapled papers across the desk. "Sign these."

With a sigh, I did what I was told. "So what's this about?"

"Are you going to be busy at all the next fourteen days? Any pressing engagements?"

I go to the movies with my best friend on the weekends. Other than that, I don't have a life.

"Not really," I shrugged. "I was just going to hang out with my friend. Why? You want me to work some overtime?"

"In...a manner of speaking."

"Is it required?"

Vuembi nodded. "It's part of your new position."

I shook my head in frustration. Why even bother asking me? "I guess I don't have a choice then. What am I doing?"

"Are you willing to relocate?"

I pictured myself taking a long road trip to Nebraska, or California. "Relocate to where?"

"Anywhere."

I groaned, thinking they intended to send me to Korea on my own pocket money. "Uh...if you're paying the travel expenses."

Vuembi laughed. "Fair enough. We'll need to get you a drug screening right away."

"I thought you people already took my clothes off and probed me," I said. "You had plenty of time to take all the tests you want."

Puppy ears just smirked at me. "You know as well as I that things don't work that perfectly. They brought you in for poisoning the other day. They weren't looking for the same things."

I frowned. "Wonderful."

"I hear you had an altercation with Sharon Jones."

I blinked. "Sharon?"

"It's short for DeSharon. I believe he goes by the name Snaker."

Sharon. I chuckled as I began to understand the man's pent up frustration.

Shrugging, I said, "I accidentally bumped his car and then he goes crazy and cuts my neck. So yeah. We met."

"How would you feel about working next to him?"

I sighed. "I've worked alongside jerks before. As long as you mind your own business, and they mind theirs, there shouldn't be a problem."

"Good. Now, what do you feel about the idea of extraterrestrial life?"

I chuckled. "You should see my DVD collection. I'd love to meet a real life space alien."

"You just have," Vuembi smiled. "And you're going to meet more."

I laughed skeptically. "I admit you look weird, but..."

He didn't reply. He just gave me this expression like nothing further needed to be said.

"You know, I was going to ask about those ears, but I thought it would be impolite."

"Yes, I am an Olneco," he said as if it were an annoyance to explain it. "We're basically like you. Tell me, who do you live with?"

"My mom, dad, and brother."

He leaned over the desk, seeming to be fascinated. "Do you have a wife? Girlfriend? Children?"

"No..."

Vuembi steepled his fingers. "Will they be fine if you leave for fourteen days?"

"I think so. They'd probably be happy to have me out of their hair. As long as there's no emergencies..."

"...and your emergency contacts are still up to date?"

"Yeah."

Vuembi raised up a hand and clenched his fist, causing fins to pop out the forearms. "Ahhh. Feels good to stretch."

I grinned as he folded the fins and pulled a colorful multiple legged object out of a glass bowl, sticking it in his mouth.

As I continued to stare, the Olneco pushed the bowl to me, offering me one.

The bowl was a mess of bumpy shells, legs, feelers and eye stalks. They didn't look like any type of bug I'd ever seen.

In my book, it didn't matter if I died, it only mattered that I died in a way that didn't cause excruciating pain.

This is why I always dreamed about finding one of those houses they always talk about in ghost stories, some place that's dirt cheap because everyone who ever lived there ended up dying, or going mad.

I'm already mad.

Poison, although slightly painful, was not as bad as falling off a building, so the idea didn't bother me.

And I always wondered what alien food tasted like.

"If I try one of these, will it show up on my drug screen?"

He laughed. "Our lab can tell the difference."

With a shrug, I picked one up and bit into the shell. The bug had the flavor of moldy bread, sauerkraut, cheesecake and Pepto Bismol, all in one. I grimaced.

"It's good, no?"

"No."

He seemed to find my facial expression hilarious. "It's an acquired taste."

Vuembi cleared his throat. "You have a day to pack everything you need for the trip."

"Where are we going. Really."

"It's like I said. Everywhere. Just pretend like you're going camping. You have gone camping before, haven't you?"

"I used to be a Boy Scout."

"Good! Excellent. Pack like you're going to be roughing it. Trust me. You'll be glad you did."

I frowned. "What is this, some kind of ridiculous leader training course?"

"Something like that."

"I'm not going to have to dig my own latrine, am I?"

"I...wouldn't rule out that possibility."

I sighed. "Fine. Whatever. It's not like I've got a choice."

"Tell me, Jason. What do you think about space travel?"

"So now I'm an astronaut?" I shook my head in annoyance. "I don't like heights. Hence why I'm not in the air force. Are we playing space camp now?"

"You just ate a Nitqoy and you're asking if we're playing?" He shrugged. "You're free to go. Just remember. You have a day to prepare. Be here at five twenty. Sharp."

So I'd lose even more sleep, I thought. "The building doesn't open until five forty five, sometimes six," I said.

"That's what you think. Use the second entrance, the one past the garbage shed."

"Oh...kay." I frowned.

"See you then."

I paused. "What about the drug test?"

"Gary will show you the lab."

I walked out, searching the office for Gary.

I found him hidden inside a cubicle adjacent to his own, drinking coffee and reading e-mail.

"Where's the lab?" I said.

Gary jumped in surprise, then turned in his swivel chair, clutching his chest. "Don't do that!"

"Sorry. I just spoke to Vuembi and he said you knew where the drug testing lab was."

He sighed. "Right this way."

And then I followed him down that narrow hallway, down the staircase in the abandoned call center, and through a few winding corridors until we reached the decompression tank.

The marker boards and file cabinets had been removed. In its place, I could see a small sterile area that looked like a hospital ward.

The place contained six empty beds, a computer on wheels, dialysis and EKG machines, and racks of medical tools, from the medieval-esque to futuristic gadgets that looked like toys.

A woman with red hair in pigtails and pointy elfin ears stood in front of a desk, checking inventory on the computer with three fingered hands, while a purple child sized salamander with no eyes reached in drawers, making clicking sounds like it were counting something. From time to time, it would dig a calculator out of its lab coat, scribbling something on a clipboard.

Gary tapped the elf on the shoulder. "Sal."

The female looked up from her computer. "Oh hi, Gary!" Her voice made an odd chirping sound, almost like punctuation. "What brings you down here?"

Gary gestured to me. "Sal, meet the new nisigi. Well, not new, he's been with Sprint for more than a year. But he's going to be helping out here, so he's going to need a Sopolo scan."

I didn't know what any of those words meant, but I didn't really want to bother picking up slang anyway.

"What happened, you got tired of using the corporate lab down the street?"

"What we're testing for, you can't get in the corporate lab."

I stared at the strangers with a mixture of shock and amusement. "Those are great costumes," I laughed.

"Thanks," said Sal. "And you must be quite proud of yours. Let me guess. You're a jerk, right?"

I just rolled my eyes.

The woman pulled a white tube shaped device out of a drawer, sticking a memory card in a box on its side.

She inserted a rubber liner, handing the object to me.

It had an opening on one end, a sieve-like attachment on the other.

"Put this over your penis and urinate into it."

I stared at her in disgust. "Seriously?"

Her facial expression seemed to say that this was as ordinary a procedure as a fecal swab test. She seemed as indifferent to the idea as one of those grumpy nurses at Lab Corp would be about a specimen jar.

"Yes. The Sopolo will scan your waste molecules for illegal substances, health defects and cloning."

"Oh...kay."

I nervously fingered the box on the side of this obscene device, but then stopped when I realized that I might be telling volumes about my personal life by accident.

"I really don't have to go right now," I blurted.

She gestured to a bed. "Then have a seat. Would you like a soda? Pepsi? Mountain Dew? Azaoca? Apple juice?"

I swallowed. "Sure. Pepsi's fine."

I sat down.

"Tobhas!" she called, making a series of loud chirps and clicking sounds.

The purple creature dropped a nasty looking saw, digging a stainless steel bottle out of a fridge. It waddled over to my bed, offering it to me.

"Why's it in a metal bottle?" I said as I grabbed it.

"We bottle it ourselves from a reservoir. It reduces waste."

"So, what, you got a lake of Pepsi?"

"No," she said. "We make our own sodas from carbonated water and syrup. It's kept in a tank."

I took a swig. "Clever."

I found the flavor to be everything I expected, except for tinges of something tasting of Fisherman's Friend cough drops and little beads of gel flavored like burnt popcorn.

I grimaced. "What did you put in this?"

"Just something to make you pee."

With a shrug, I drank more, staring into the tube device. "There's holes in the bottom of this. How are you going to test anything?"

She gave me a look like I were crazy. "Your planet is so barbaric. To piss in a plastic jar? It's disgusting!" She sighed. "The Sopolo is computerized. The matrix of filters scans waste particles as you-"

All of a sudden, my bladder felt like it were going to explode. I jumped to my feet, fighting the urge to let it all go right there. "Where-"

She pointed to a sterile looking hospital bathroom. "Place the Sopolo in the cabinet when you're finished."

And so I hurried through the door, slamming the door shut behind me.

It was humiliating, but I did what she asked, voiding through the rubber sleeve. Once done, I stuck it in a specimen cabinet in the wall above the toilet tank.

"Am I done?" I asked her when I came out.

"Basically."

I saw her take a gun shaped device into the restroom, and there was a noise like that of a vacuum cleaner. A moment later, she stepped back out, pushing buttons and staring at a screen on the gun.

"Congratulations. You're negative for illegal substances." She frowned, squinting at the results.

"Something wrong?" Gary asked.

She tapped the gun. "It's nothing. I think there must be something wrong with the device."

"Does he need to be retested?"

"No...I'm just trying to figure out why every time I use this thing, the device seems to always say that the subject has 1.3% Xikkar count in their system. Even when we re-test our subjects, it always comes back to that same number."

"If the reading is accurate, would that much Xikkar interfere with job performance?"

She shook her head. "It's too small a quantity, and I don't even know if it's his doing. He has none of the symptoms of Xikkar abuse. This definitely looks like an error."

"He doesn't strike me as a drug addict," Gary smirked. "I think he'll be fine."

"So," I asked. "Now what. Want me to just go back up and complete my shift?"

Gary checked his watch. "Yep. Unless you want to be short some hours."

I walked to the door.

"You know how to get back, right?"

I nodded. "I think so."

And so I walked out the door, wandering down the hallway in search of the stairs.

As I passed a framed inspirational poster picturing an eagle in flight, I bumped into an old manager I thought I'd never see again. Brian Ross.

Brian had been my boss when I was working for Convergys collecting on Chevy car loans.

He wasn't old in years, only about thirty years old, and he looked every bit the young Republican. Conservative hair, conservative suit and slacks, loud tie.

He really didn't do much in the office other than chatting up female representatives, shouting balance in full, and giving pep talks. His primary achievement seemed to be putting an entry in the policy database that said "Brian is awesome," and "ninjas are cool."

I stared at him in shock. "What are you doing here?"

He grinned. "I was about to ask you the same question."

"Are you with DOGOS?"

He nodded. "Team manager. Are you?"

"Yeah. Well, not a manager, but..."

Once assured that my speech would not result in me getting fired and blackballed, I explained how I got into this mess.

He just laughed. "We're going to be working together! How awesome is that!"

I just shook my head.

Dork.

"It's pretty awesome, all right," I replied lamely.

Before walking away, he did that little annoying thing where he clicks his tongue and flicks his index finger at me.

When I glanced back, I saw him walking into the little hospital.

And so I returned to the Sprint office, resuming my usual work.

When a coworker messaged me about what I'd been up to, I said it was a performance review, and that I did well.

The rest of the day passed in the ordinary way. The usual dull phone calls, the usual schedule.

When I came home from work, I found dad doing the dishes, and he wasn't happy. I'd skipped a day, and now he was upset, grumbling about how he was the only one who did chores around the house.

"I was just about to do them!" I protested.

"When? Next week? You need to do dishes every day. Just like laundry and everything else. If you're going to live here, you're going to follow our rules."

"C'mon, dad! I wasn't going to let them pile up that bad. I had every intention of doing them!"

"Yeah. When they're all piled up to the ceiling and we have a black ring around the sink!"

"But I work!"

"Your mother helps out and she works. When you move out, are you just not going to clean up after yourself, or bathe?"

"I'm going to bathe! I always bathe!"

"You're just not going to do the dishes. You said you're living like you're moving out. Are you just going to eat out all the time and never wash a dish?"

"No!"

"Then you got to start doing something around here besides drawing those dribblings all the time."

I sighed. "Fine. I was wrong. I'll do the dishes every day." I cleared my throat. "Dad. Something came up at work."

'"What, they fired you?"

"No...actually there's a...leadership event. I guess I'm going to be roughing it for two weeks in the woods or something."

"Gives me less dishes to clean.' he grumbled. "Where are you going?"

"I...don't know. They're very secretive about it. Hopefully we're not just going down to the lake and singing kumbaya."

"I thought you liked things like that. You're always going to choir retreats and all those church functions..."

"It's not the same thing. We'll probably spend all that time talking about management and complying to procedures."

"Are you being promoted?"

"I...don't know. I think it's more of a...lateral move."

Over supper, which I cooked, I told mom about the excursion.

"Sounds like fun," she said. "Do you know what you'll be doing down there?"

"Not really. They didn't tell me much of anything. They didn't even say where we were going. I guess it's camping, though. They told me I should bring camping supplies."

"Camping is fun," she said.

"Yeah. Maybe. I don't know about two weeks, but whatever."

I spent the rest of the evening packing, shopping and doing laundry to take with me.

As I loaded everything in my trunk, dad father jokingly asked me if I were moving out. Several times. As if it were funny the second and third time.

I tried to humor dad by doing the dishes, but as in other occasions, the opportunity to prove myself was taken away from me, rendering the scolding useless.

I slept fitfully that night, kept awake by anxiety about the upcoming fourteen day excursion. I only slept about an hour, my much needed REM sleep interrupted by an alarm at four in the morning.

I showered, dressed, ate and left while everyone was in bed.

At the building, I carried my suitcases to the door they described and left them there as I went to get my sleeping bag and the rest of my supplies.

When I returned to the door, I noticed that my stuff had vanished.

The door swung open and I saw the midget stepping out, grabbing the bag I'd just set down.

"C'mon. Hurry. We're moving in twenty minutes."

"Are we doing a caravan?" I said. "Where's the vehicle?"

He gave me a blank look. "What?"

"Um, shouldn't we leave the stuff out here until the bus comes?...or car, or whatever?"

Victor laughed. "Bus!" Shaking his head, he slapped a concrete wall. "This is the bus, kid."

I stared at him in bafflement. "Is this some kind of Zen thing? One hand clapping? Something supposed to make me shut off my rational mind?"

He shrugged. "Sure, if it makes you feel better. Why not. Tell me. You ever seen the movie _Stargate_, kid?"

"Uh, yeah..."

"_This building_ is like a giant Stargate. I think it must be using a giant wormhole. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. The other theory I heard was something about haunted houses and time travel, but I still don't get that one." He blew a raspberry. "Anyways, you got roughly..." He stared at his cel phone. "Twenty, er, fifteen minutes to get your shit in here before the building takes off to who knows where."

I just laughed at him. "You're stretching credibility here."

"Kid, you don't know half of it."

"I mean, okay, I believe in aliens. I saw some weird stuff. You got some manager with funny ears, and there's an elf and a purple gecko in the hospital."

"Tobhas," said victor.

"What?"

"He's a Rapwoy from the planet Wocon."

I frowned. "Okay. I'm just saying, I don't believe this building can go anywhere."

Victor crossed his arms. "You believe it can travel forward in time, right?"

Smirking, I said, "I know it travels through time like everything does, one day at a time."

"True, but it does more than that."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, right."

"Believe what you want, but if you don't get your stuff in here fast, you won't be seeing it again for a very long time."

"Right, because someone's going to steal it, right?"

He shrugged. "We won't be here, so if anything is lost to theft, it's on you."

"You're really serious about this, aren't you?"

"Believe what you want. You probably got ten minutes left."

"Assuming that what you're saying is true,/does this happen/did/this does this kind of thing happen all the time?"

"Pretty much."

"Then why didn't I notice anything? I've been working here for a year and a half!"

"Did you go into other parts of the building every day, or did you just stay in the call center until your breaks and lunch?"

"Uh..."

"Exactly. There's a dimensional pocket protecting certain zones of the building. From time to time, an observant person may have noticed something amiss, like a giant bat flying across the farmer's field in the distance, but people like you just sit there and read books and text during breaks, so you don't see anything."

I frowned.

"C'mon. I'll show you to your sleeping quarters."

I goggled at him in surprise. "Sleeping quarters? Here?"

"You'll figure it out soon enough. Is this all your bags, or is there something else back at the car?"

"I...think that's it. I can probably go back to the car if I-"

"No. No you can't. Either you get your stuff, or it's gone for two weeks."

I shrugged. "I'm fine. Let's see these `quarters'."

And so I followed the dwarf as waddled down the staircase in the abandoned call center, through a long stretch of hallway, and around a corner to a room full of bunk beds.

"Not much privacy, but you get used to it. The bathroom has a lock, if it's any consolation. If you want to fraternize, so to speak, you might want to look elsewhere."

I set my things down, setting my sleeping bag on a top bunk.

"Class starts in a couple minutes, if it hasn't started already. I'll show you the room."

And so I followed Victor back down the hallway, to the other end of the building, watching as he knocked on a closed door.

It came open, and I was staring into the weird looking face of Mr. Vuembi.

The alien dismissed Victor and led me inside.

It was the standard drab gray classroom with rows of work tables, a markerboard and beat up chairs. What wasn't standard were the silver cones and miniature sandboxes full of rocks I saw at every desk.

Vuembi led me to a seat at near end of a table, in between a lanky black man in an oversized shirt, and a rather sour looking dark skinned older woman with dyed blonde hair and hideously bright eye makeup.

I stared at the sandbox in front of me, poking one of the rocks.

Vuembi slapped my hand. "Don't touch that."

He turned to face the rest of the class. "Everybody. Hands off the Gezrot. This is highly sensitive material and you can seriously damage the mechanism if you're not careful. These things are imported, so they're not very easy to replace."

I placed my hands in my lap, impatiently awaiting an explanation.

"Before I begin," the alien said. "I need to give you a little history lesson. Dogos was founded in 3029 on the planet Geidi Prime. The original purpose of the company was shipping a drug called melange to different planets."

I gawked at him in surprise. Raising my hand, I said, "So you're saying Dune is real?"

The manager stared at me. "What's Dune?"

"It's..." I stammered. "It's basically what you just described. Giant sandworms and people with glowing eyes."

Blank stare.

With a grin, I kept going. "Are we going to meet Paul Atreides?"

He just shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about, but let's get back on track. The company began as Harkonnen Industries, but over time the name was changed to FARUK, expanding beyond the sale of drugs to other materials such as food, wilderness survival gear, and eventually communication devices, security services, and women's handbags.

"Enter DOGOS. DOGOS was a successful line of merchant centers on the planet Tappuc. They sold a vast assortment of materials, from soup to nuts, and spread like wildfire across their planet. I'd personally compare them to Walmart. DOGOS got so big that they had to expand outward into space. And when they serendipitously ran headlong into FARUK, it proved to be an unbeatable team, and they soon had centers set up all over the galaxy. Our call center is an experiment. If we do well, we miught have a DOGOS store coming to our planet sometime soon. If not, they might choose to close our department and we'll be out of a significant amount of revenue. So this project is very important. You're here because you're the best, and we trust you'll be the right kinds of people who will finally bring DOGOS to earth and make our site number one in the galaxy."

I raised my hand. "What about House Atreides?"

The teacher grimaced. "Let me tell you something about House Atreides. House Atreides is what the Independent party is to the Republican party. Their pie-in-the-sky tree hugging philosophy was totally impractical for modern business and society as a whole, and they simply don't have the popular support to be of any real significance in galactic commerce."

The whole thing seemed so ridiculous that I had to keep going with my line of thought. "So...we're working for a floating fat man?"

Blank stare.

Before I could speak again, Vuembi said, "Mr Finch, it would be best if you forget whatever wild stories you've heard and just pay attention to what you're being taught. These silly stories can be discussed at a later date or at break or lunch when we have more time."

A hand raised up behind me. "Hate to disagree with you, but throughout history, independent parties have from time to time gained enough popular support to get the president elected."

"All right, smartass," said the teacher. "We're getting way off track. As previously stated, FARUK teamed up with DOGOS, and that's where we come in." He cleared his throat. "We've only got two weeks to cover this material, so listen up. First and foremost..."

Vuembi placed a hand on one of the sandboxes, flipping one of the rocks in it. I heard a sound like running water, and a strange abstract symbol suddenly appeared in the air.

"This is a Gezrot," he said.

"On each one of your desks, if you haven't noticed yet, there are Gezrot. These are highly advanced computer systems from planet Woirtu. You are now free to experiment with the interface."

These devices had desktops, but it was all holographic. Things floated in the air instead of moving around on monitors, and the desk had a third dimension, a constant annoyance.

I saw classmates flicking around the rocks, creating the sound of a gurgling stream, and did some experimenting myself. It turned out there wasn't any sand in the box, and when I rolled around a spherical stone, it moved around a cursor.

"Once you get used to the interface," said Vuembi, "I want you to novlar, or type in the code I put on the board and await my instructions."

Following the directions, I flipped over select ones to fill in the floating login prompt.

Once past that, I stared at a bewildering array of icons and text.

"This is the main desktop," said Vuembi. "You'll notice it is not truly a desktop because Kumazo does not use Microsoft Windows. We are lucky to even have a graphical interface."

After walking everyone through the login prompts, Vuembi told us to open a program called Soorix, which turned out to be a customer profile program containing data, fingerprints, and a 3D model of the individual. The alien individual.

I stared in fascination at the different "clients," four foot tall bears, bug monsters, humanoid alien people...I almost wet my pants in excitement.

"Remember, no matter what they look like, treat them with the utmost respect, like regular human customers."

"What's that red block of text on the bottom?" I asked as I examined the `screen.'

"That's skip tracing information telling you if they're armed and dangerous or have other criminal attributes to watch out for. You won't need to use that information."

I noticed two of my classmates tinkering with the device, clicking the rocks around until a holographic image of a topless woman with four breasts appeared above their desk.

The boss, understandably angry, stomped over to them as they giggled and pointed, casually flipped over a few rocks, and the image vanished.

"Gentlemen, all policies regarding use of electronic communications apply to the Gezrot. If I see you accessing xalxub again it will be grounds for termination, do I make myself clear?"

The two nodded nervously, making themselves very slight in attempts to draw the attention from themselves.

We spent the next hours opening and closing various menus and accessing different windows in a repetitive style that resembled martial arts drilling.

As I neared the end of the another hour, I felt I might wet my pants for a different reason entirely.

We finished our computer drill, and our instructor told us to direct our attention his way again.

"Languages," said Vuembi. "The client does not speak English. Each of you will be given a special translation device to allow for easy communication. You will find them slightly uncomfortable, but we all have to wear them, managers included.

"That being said, Jandax are known to crap out on occasion, so I want you to learn some important words and phrases."

He wrote on the markerboard. "Neepra is the standard language of the galaxy. While many other dialects exist, Neepra is like English in its dominance. I will teach you the phrases you need to know on the communication device. First, the basic greeting. Hi. My name is Vuembi from DOGOS." He wrote on the board as he talked. "`Dusaq. Cahna Vuembi de DOGOS.'"

He dropped to the next line. "This is an attempt to collect a debt, and any information obtained will be used for that purpose. `Ruhd jilagosa rolakabi coexnet, kai algot putunitrib roradu welkbitu coz ruhd qasolire.' Why isn't any one writing this down?"

We all started scribbling furiously.

While I seemed to have an aptitude for speaking some strange language with Ms. Augustine, it apparently didn't help me during these lessons, leading me to believe that it was unrelated.

The language lesson went on for more than two hours. Somehow my bladder settled enough to let me continue holding it in.

"I'm tired," said one of the students. "When's break?"

"Actually," said the instructor. "We don't get breaks here. I know it seems unfair, but we don't have any legal leg to stand on. Officially, the moment you step into DOGOS facilities, you are no longer in the United States. DOGOS does not recognize the same labor laws that we currently enjoy in the U.S. You are allowed only a thirty minute lunch for an eight hour work day."

That didn't seem right to me, but I signed that agreement already, so I wasn't sure what I could do. I couldn't afford a lawyer, even if this was unconstitutional, and I doubted if I could find another paying job.

"What if we have to use the bathroom?" I blurted.

Vuembi waved his hand dismissively. "We have methods of solving that problem. We also have measures in place to help you quit smoking, in case anyone's wondering."

"I'll go on strike," someone blurted.

"You see, that's the problem. We don't want to _piss off_ the client, we're under a contract that states that no strikes will be recognized. In fact, if anyone does go on strike, we're required to fire everyone on strike or lose the project."

A skinny black girl with braided hair stood up, marching out the door.

"That's all right," he said. "I'll have a talk with her later. Now, we're halfway through the language lesson, so just hold on. We're almost done with it. Just a few more topics to cover. This is how you discuss payment options. `Snaib gofuchik ip dool heswen deced.' I can offer you a five month plan."

And on the lesson went. The girl with the braids came back in, looking flushed and angry, but she didn't speak. She just sulkily slipped into a chair, taking notes like nothing had happened.

"I'm having trouble staying focused," I protested. "It would be easier if we got a fifteen minute break."

"Nice try, Mr. Finch. I suggest you stand up or do whatever you have to do to stay alert. Lunch will be in an hour."

I didn't like it, but what could I do? I stood up, trying to keep my bladder from spilling.

At 11:40 the teacher said, "All right. Twenty minutes to twelve. I know you're tired, so I'll give you a tour of the facilities and you can go to lunch."

It was the first time I truly got to familiarize myself with the layout.

Past my sleeping quarters, there was set of closed storage areas, the sleeping quarters for management, and, in the center of the floor, diagonal from my room, there stood the male and female showers.

"Here's the restrooms," Vuembi said. "You'll notice they come equipped with special changing areas, which you will be thankful for later. Trust me."

I stared at him. "Changing?"

"You'll find out soon enough.

"You mean like dressing rooms?"

"Not exactly. See for yourself." Crossing his arms, he gestured for us to hurry in and use the facilities.

It wasn't what I expected. The place had only a couple stalls and urinals. Mostly I saw rows of what appeared to be vacuum hoses on the wall, and a set of fold out plastic benches. I didn't want to think about what all of this meant. I only knew I had to stand in a line to take care of business.

When everyone came back out, Vuembi led us around the building some more.

There was a giant freezer behind the power station/generator that supposedly allowed the building to function on every planet. The place had a dojo, and a room that Vuembi said was responsible for providing oxygen to the entire building.

On the floor below, I saw a self contained water reservoir, a laundromat, and a library.

I could tell there was more, but Vuembi just turned us around and led us back upstairs.

Unknown to me at the time, there was actually a cafeteria behind the little hospital room. When we turned the corner past that place and marched down a hallway, I could see it.

It was a large gray room filled with long rectangular tables, with a buffet with a sneeze guard running along the back wall.

"And here's the lunch room," our guide said. "Remember. We meet back at 12:45. You're dismissed!"

I somehow found my way back to the sleeping quarters and got my lunch, but then I got lost.

As I wandered around the hallway, staring into a room full of radio equipment, I noticed Grace marching up to me.

"The cafeteria's down at the other end." Grinning, she pointed down the hallway.

I gave her an embarrassed smile. "Thanks."

Before she could walk away, I said, "Aren't you dead?"

She gave me a blank look. "I'm sorry?"

I explained the story of her fictional namesake.

"Hollywood," she sighed. "They have the story all wrong."

I laughed, astonished at what I was hearing. "What?"

"Nothing," she said, looking flustered. "Joking." And she gave me a fake laugh. "You get ried of people making stupid comments about your name."

"Then why don't you change it?" I said.

She didn't reply. She just walked away.

I tried to follow her directions, but I just got lost. Instead, I went upstairs to the Sprint break room.

When I saw the view out the window, I dropped my lunch bag.

Instead of the familiar white concrete parking lot overlooking a farm property, I saw a parking lot with a large parking garage, with a shopping center across the street behind it. The window on the far end displayed a wooded area full of weeds.

"We're on Metcalf," said a voice behind me. "We have sites all over town. If you want, you can run up the street to Dairy Queen, but don't get stranded."

I turned around and stared at the figure in the button up shirt and tan slacks. "Harry? Aren't you supposed to be working for Sprint?"

"I should be asking you the same question," he smiled.

I just shook my head in disbelief.

He walked up to the window, staring out. "I saw some Canada geese out here earlier. Wonder if they'll come back?"

I stared out the window, dumb with shock at what I saw.

Buildings don't move. You can't just magically teleport a big office like mine into another location.

It didn't make any sense, but yet there it was. The wrong parking lot. Somehow the building was on Metcalf.

Realizing that time was getting away from me, I microwaved my food and seated myself at a table.

"Are you okay?"

I looked up and saw the girl with the charcoal leggings and African idol face staring at me.

"Fine," I shrugged.

I asked her name, and she said it was Juanita Chafen. She already knew mine.

"Uh...I guess it's okay to disclose DOGOS stuff to you, right?"

"Yeah?"

So I explained how I got sick and trapped in the DOGOS company.

Her eyes widened. "Wow. I only filled out an application!"

"Maybe your stats are better than mine," I muttered.

"So what do you think about everything so far?"

"I think this whole thing is nuts," I said. "Aliens, weird computers, no breaks due to some diplomatic immunity thing I don't understand. This can't be legal."

"I heard someone tried to sue them one time."

"Oh yeah? What happened?"

She shrugged. "I have no idea."

"They still didn't explain what you could do if you had to go during your shift."

"Hold it?"

I rolled my eyes. At least when you're a woman, you generally wear a pad or something. "Yeah, right. And how long can you keep that up?"

"I guess we'll find out."

I shook my head. "Have you met Grace Augustine?"

She nodded. "I'm pretty sure everyone has. She's H.R."

I told her about her strange outburst regarding Avatar.

Juanita leaned over the table, whispering to me in conspiratorial tones. "I heard she got molested by a Na'vi when she was little. That's why she's still single."

"Afraid of being violated?" I whispered.

"Naw. I hear she's just holding out for another blue guy. She never puts her hair up because there are ports in the back of her skull."

She sat back in her seat.

Harry just chuckled and stared out the glass.

I stared at the girl, thinking about how this little camping trip would be a great opportunity for me to acquaint myself with the opposite sex, but, being the abysmal failure I am, and being intimidated by her scary eyebrows and severe expression, I didn't bother. I just finished my lunch.

The girl walked away, but I saw that I had a few minutes left, so I joined Harry in staring out the windows.

I still couldn't believe that the building had relocated without the use of a massive semi.

All of a sudden, I saw a fog roll in, swirling around the glass windows until I could see nothing at all.

Bewildered, I pressed my face against the glass.

Wham! A second later, I saw a mass of leathery scales and muscle slamming against the glass, flashing a set of glistening claws and razor sharp teeth.

"Holy shit!" I jumped back from the glass, staring in shock as as a two legged reptile sniffed and paced back and forth around the fire exit, periodically scratching the glass and fogging the panes.

Swearing softly, I ran out of the cafeteria, into the hallway, out of view of that particular row of windows.

"The building is protected by a force field," I heard Harry say. "That's why the glass isn't cracking. I'm not sure how much it can stand, but I've seen bullets bounce off it, and dinosaurs larger than that have run into it without doing any serious damage."

I find it hard to believe in magic shields and amulets when a muscular toothy reptile is pounding on a glass window and trying to make me his lunch. "How large?"

Harry laughed. "Well, the one I saw was about the size of a Buick. It tried to hit the area over by the trash can in the corner, but it only ended up with a headache. Still, if a T-rex ever comes by here, I'm not going to be nonchalantly eating my lunch here."

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Honestly, I don't know. I can only guess we're in the Jurassic era or something. Of course, our planet isn't the only place with dinosaurs in it."

And then he started rambling about evolution.

I didn't agree, but didn't feel like arguing. I just rolled his eyes and stared at the window.

No sight of the dinosaur.

The fog suddenly cleared, and I saw the windows fill with jungle plants, giant trees and vines.

"Now what?" I asked. "What is this?"

Harry shrugged. "Got me!"

With caution, I crept up to the glass, peering through the glass at the unusually shaped foliage, trees with giant ferns growing out of them, trees with bark patterned with button-like growths, massive pitcher plants and vines with eyes on them.

"Roar!"

I jumped at the sound, but then realized it was a prank.

Harry laughed, then stared out the window with me. "That's interesting. I wonder what evolutionary function those eyes serve?"

"I don't know," I frowned. "I'm not sure why God would make something like that either, or what god would."

Awkward pause.

"Maybe it's a protective mechanism for the tree," Harry said at last.

I checked my watch and saw I was going to be late. I hurried back downstairs, but got lost trying to find the classroom.

I went down a hallway, turned a corner, and found myself wandering past the water reservoir.

Hearing a loud shriek, I jumped back in surprise, staring down the hallway where a group of people in business casual attire attempted to wrangle a giant pterodactyl thing that flapped and banged against the ceiling, knocking down foam tiles.

The creature's single red eye glared at the crowd balefully as it flapped its splotchy yellow-purple wings, its stubby shovel shaped beak snapping at anyone who got too close.

"Hold her still!" I heard a voice yell. "I got this!"

I heard a metallic snap, then a short stumpy figure marched out of the crowd with a rifle aimed high in the air. "Keep it still!" he called. "I've got to get it in the heart!"

"That's what you said last time!" someone said.

"So I forgot the heart is above its genitals! So what! Shut up and keep it still! This is my last dart!"

Standing rigid like a statue, gun locked on his target, he fired.

I heard a pop, and the creature shrieked in protest, swooping down to attack him.

Letting out a most unmanly scream, Vincent turned and fled down the corridor.

My corridor.

The one I stood in.

There he was, screaming and stomping, closer and closer, with the pissed off razor clawed demon bird hot on his heels.

With a terrified yell, I jumped back into a recessed part of the wall just minutes before the creature dove down from the ceiling, snapping its beak.

The recess in the wall wasn't very much protection. It only went back a couple feet. If that thing wanted a bite of me, it could easily shove its face into the crack and tear into me.

I didn't know what the hell was going on. All I knew was, I wanted to get out of the hallway, and fast.

I broke into a run.

The beast banked sharply, letting out an angry squawk as it chased me down the tunnel.

Before I got too far, he stepped the wrong way and stumbled over a small body, tripping and falling on the floor.


	9. Chapter 9: Ikran Juice

Author's note: The previous chapter has been rewritten, with several changes made to the scenes and characters.

* * *

A moment later, I felt a big heavy wall of flesh landing on top of me, filling my nostrils with the smell of rotten bagels and sweaty socks.

The thing wasn't moving. I felt certain that I would die of suffocation if my rib cage didn't first collapse from the weight.

For a few tense moments, I struggled beneath this hot mass of smelly leather, unable to free himself as a pair of tiny fists next to me slammed into anything within reach, including me.

The midget was screaming, using up valuable air. I tried to push myself up, but the beast was too damn heavy.

Suddenly a meaty hand appeared at the corner, and the wall of dinosaur skin was lifted up.

Fearing I wouldn't get another chance, I bolted that way and found himself staring up at an impassive bearded face framed in chain mail.

The IT man from Sprint. In his full Renfest regalia.

I stared at him incredulously. "Hey! You're the bridge guy, aren't you?"

"That is one of my titles," he said with a faint smirk. "Today it's vehicle rescue services."

"How is this rescuing a vehicle?"

"The Hummer 's swamped with Ikran," said a voice behind me. "The razorbacks bombed it with pheromone."

I turned around and saw a tall lanky figure with glasses and wavy hair. Sam. "Who bombed what?"

"Save your questions for the meeting. Let's get this thing rolled over."

I watched as Victor, the bridge guy and the others rolled the creature on its back, splaying its legs. The thing had four lumpy protuberances down there, like swollen tumors with holes in their centers.

"All right," said Sam. "How do you propose we get this stuff out?"

Victor crossed his arms. "We jack it off, then stick a big popcorn bucket under its crotch." He turned his head. "Needle!"

He stuck a chubby finger into one of the holes. "Big needle! And a siphon!"

The little guy brought out a digit covered in pink slime, sticking it into his mouth.

"You're sick," said Sam.

"You know what this tastes like?"

"I dunno. Shit?"

The midget gazed at the ceiling, like he were a wine connoisseur describing a vintage. "It's...kind of like wasabi horseradish and cake batter and Worcestershire sauce all rolled up in one. Might taste good on sausage."

Sam laughed and shook his head. "You are so wrong! What if that shit gives you some horrible disease?"

Victor shrugged. "We all gotta go sometime. Got sprayed in the face with this crap a few days ago."

I saw Sal rolling a cart up the hallway, its shelves loaded with medical tools and a vacuum pump. "Please tell me you're not going to try to make steaks again, are you? To this day, I still can't get that smell out of my bedroom."

Victor grinned sheepishly. "The thought had crossed my mind."

"Well hen barbecue it outside, or I'll find a way to make your life miserable."

"No! Please!" Victor laughed. "Not another wife!"

"Do you want me to stick this needle somewhere else?"

Victor waved his hands in surrender. "No ma'am. Not until you can figure out where my veins are."

I saw him waving a bruised arm at me. "See this, kid? This is what happens when you go to Sal for a Tibtar immunization."

"No, it's what happens when you slap Sal on the bottom before a Tibtar immunization. You know, I'm pretty sure your behavior is against company harassment policy."

He gave her a wink. "You know you like it, double digit."

The woman ignored him, giving me a confused stare. "Aren't you supposed to be in that orientation meeting?"

I shrugged. "I am?"

She nodded. "Mission briefing. You should go."

"When is it?"

Sam checked his watch. "It's half over. Go down the hall. It's the big classroom."

I leaned over the giant body on the floor, gawking at it. "But how..." I stammered. "What's this thing doing here?"

Victor sighed. "I'll fill you in tomorrow. Suffice to say, this big bitch is going to have to go back through customs, pronto."

As an afterthought, he glanced up at the doctor. "No offense, sweetie. I was talking about the bird."

She scowled. "For that, I'm going to pepper your room with little black shoes for you to polish."

"Ouch."

Victor frowned at me. "Beat it, kid."


	10. Chapter 10: Dotar Sojat

Following Sam's directions, I marched down to the end of the hall, creeping through the open doors I found at the end.

Inside, I found a large version of my classroom. Same weird equipment, same kind of desks. I stood in a crowd of male and female employees, all dressed in polos and slacks or other regular office attire.

All types of people stood crammed inside that room, running along the outer row of cubicles, from buxom high school grads to old and gray haired, tall and short, obese and skinny, in all colors of the human palette (plus quite a few from some other palette).

In the center of this crowd, I could see Gary. When our eyes met, he seemed annoyed at me for some reason, but he didn't speak to me. Instead, he addressed the crowd.

"If you've read Terra Incognita or The Tale of Two Birds by Emil Malak, or seen his movie, it's wrong. Just to let you know."

I just stared at him, unsure about what the hell he was talking about.

"It should be pretty obvious that we're not on Earth, and that it's a jungle planet. The place we're at is called `Pandora'. It's a planet, not a moon, and the air is toxic to breathe. Uh, guys, if any of you have seen those movies, don't make any assumptions. This isn't what you think. For one thing, we're not here for mining. If you see any glowing rocks that look like they could be radioactive, don't touch them. That stuff, whatever it is, eats through Hazmat suits and corrodes lead, so, uh, just don't touch any of those rocks, okay, guys?"

There were nods and murmurs of assent.

I frowned in confusion.

The thought occurred to me that this Malak person might either be the screenwriter for Avatar, or that guy who sued James Cameron about stealing his script. If it were the latter, I'd seen that guy's website, and it didn't look anything like Avatar. Not unless there were gay genies and multicolored panda bears in the deleted scenes.

I just shook my head.

Gary pushed a button on a remote control, changing the picture on the flat screen television.

Now, instead of displaying a picture of statistics, it showed a thickly muscled blue creature, naked save for a tiny brown loincloth.

It wasn't what I was expecting. The beast had the head of a warthog, complete with tusks, wide flabby ears, and a pig snout.

"These are `razorbacks'," said Gary. "They're blue, and they have dreadlocks, but trust me when I say you definitely do not want them stuck in any part of you."

He changed the picture to that of a scary looking green wolf hound covered in porcupine spikes.

"Oh, and that news story about wild dogs roaming loose and attacking people...those aren't really dogs. They came from here."

He cleared his throat.

"In case you're new or you don't remember what we're doing here, the U.S. Bank facility at has gone silent, leaving us and two other facilities to pick up the slack. Normally they'd be able to handle the call volume, but NASLOR is experiencing attendance issues, and Runbis has been infested with Senlof biters."

I stared at a plasma TV attached to one wall, displaying a live bar graph of call center statistics. The graph changed and I was looking at a star chart, full of odd squiggling symbols.

"What's worse, we're currently entering the third quarter, the busiest time of the year, so the pressure's on to re-establish the communication network, unless y'all want to do some serious overtime. For the time being, your responsibilities are as follows:

"Tier 1 employees will field calls for Nomock, Vilrup Corp and Talpux. Tier 2 will transfer over to Facility B once contact with the other department is established. Tier 3 will accompany Vincent in reconnaissance, securing the facility. It's not as exciting as it sounds.

"Also, I probably need to remind you that, while we don't fire people here, we do have some nice unpleasant alternative jobs/for you to do if/for discipline problems. Lisa, could you do the honors?"

A short twenty year old black woman stepped forward with a stack of papers clutched in her hand.

"Everybody, listen up. These are your team and tier assignments. Most of you already know your assignment, but some of you are new, and there have been some changes to the roster since last time." She cleared her throat. "Brett Spore: Ted Shanks..."

It was a long list, one that assigned everyone to a handful of managers on various tiers.

I guessed I actually was supposed to be at the meeting, because she read my name, designating me tier two under manager Necel Sebobo.

After wandering aimlessly through the crowd of assembled employees for a few minutes, I got directed to a tall curly haired blonde person of indeterminate sex.

Although this person wore a skirt, they were flat chested, they had short hair, and the shape of the aged face could belong to a male or a female. Its exposed legs were long and shapely, but covered in a coat of chestnut colored fur, patterned like an owl. Again, not clearly either sex.

"Are you Necel?" I asked.

"Guep. I am Necel Sebobo," it said. The voice sounded like a woman with a frog in her throat, or an effeminate guy. "You're Jason correct?"

"Yeah."

A long tail extended from beneath the stranger's skirt, making beckoning gestures at me.

With a shrug, I shook the tail, continuing to stare. I didn't want to offend the stranger by asking what sex it was, so I just stammered, "What will I be doing again?"

"What did they tell you in training class"

He shrugged. "Customer service and collections?"

"There you go."

Neecel waved a tail in the direction of the exit. "Juz. I'll show you to the floor."

I followed this individual back down the hallway, past the reservoir, then the laundromat.

We went down a staircase, turned a corner, and I found myself staring into a strange looking gray room full of tall drums with little doors on the side.

"This is the Tivsok where you'll be doing all your calls," my new manager said.

"Why do you have round cubicles?"

"They're Cagros units with built in relay. You're going to be doing live video chat. The walls help to block out distracting background activity to increase professionalism."

Necel opened one of the drums and I saw a desk with a sandbox computer and a flat elevated metal bench connected to a wall where a small cabinet stood.

"It's got everything you need to do your job," said Necel. "Some people like to put stimpacks or Red Bull in the desk so they can stay awake."

I pointed to a bottle on the wall. "What's this?"

"It's water. Each cubicle has an auto refilling bottle. Some people call it a hamster feeder."

I frowned, following Necel to a drum on a different row.

"This is your Cagros unit. We haven't got the name tags on them yet."

He waved to the one next to it. "This one belongs to Dennis the quality coach. Mine is on the end."

I followed it back out to the hall.

"Have you been given a tour of the rest of the place?"

I shrugged. "Basically."

"Aren't you supposed to be in training class right now?"

I frowned. "I got lost, and then I was told to go to a meeting."

"You'd better get back. Just as a reminder, we have you twenty four hours. You get a brief recess after the first training session, then you come back for another eight hours. That's how we condense our training to only a few days. Who is your training manager?"

"Vuembi," I frowned.

"They should still be holding class in room 103."

With an annoyed sigh, I ran down the hallway in search of the classroom.

After wandering for several minutes, I found it, but the door was closed, so I knocked, and Vuembi led me to an open seat, next to a fat faced guy with spiky hair. I sat down, pushing in the empty chair adjacent to mine.

I stared at the teacher, annoyed that I had missed half the lecture.

He seemed to have been lecturing on spousal permission. Picking up a pen, I tried to keep up the best I could, writing down the various places where spouses were permitted to discuss the account, and what constituted a spouse when the definition on a planet was unclear.

I noticed someone pull up a seat next to me, but paid little attention as I tried to keep up with the instructor. I saw something green out of the corner of my eye, but thought they just had on a colorful outfit.

As I was writing down some details about postdated payments and other details, I heard Vuembi say it was all in the packet, and thick booklets got passed around.

I saw a slender green hand passing me a stack of papers, and as I took a sheet and passed the papers on, I looked up and saw the slender, shapely body attached to it, a flat chested but pretty thing in a leather harness and loincloth, with four arms and a pair of tusks growing out of the sides of its head.

I stared up at the flat frog-like face with awed fascination. She had small cup shaped antennas, and only a pair of slots for a nose.

With a chuckle, I took a sheet and passed the stack along.

Her widely spaced toad's eyes blinked me in puzzlement. They didn't quite meet mine, but I didn't care. I smiled bashfully, giving her a little wave.

Okay, so I was more than fascinated.

She let out an amused snort, but seemed to be even more puzzled.

Not wanting to be rude, I looked away, which caused the creature to giggle.

The stack of papers were something about agreeing to terms of various laws I'd never heard of. I figured I'd know what they were soon enough, so I signed everything in the stack. Well, everything written in English, which happened to be about half of the pile.

As I filled out yet another sheet, I felt a tap on the shoulder. Looking to my right, I saw the green thing busying itself with paperwork, so I glanced back at the other row.

A gray haired hippie with a bandanna was seated directly behind me, but he was busy with papers, and he didn't seem to be the mischievous type.

Hearing a snort again, I glanced at my green desk partner, but she just mutely filled out her forms, oblivious.

Shaking my head, I returned my attention to the paperwork.

Once we had handed in our papers with everything signed the prescribed way, Vuembi had us introduce ourselves to the class. Apparently, face to face social networking is an acceptable business practice for other planets, even if a fifteen minute break isn't.

I'm really bad at names. I never remember the names of people in these little show and tell sessions. What I did remember was the moment when my green acquaintance got up to do hers.

I stared at this slender creature as she walked up in front of the markerboard, gazing at her hips, her bare belly...

Feeling her eyes on me, I quickly forced my eyes upwards, staring in to eyes that were too far apart for them to meet mine all the way. Red irises with black pupils.

"My name is Ibira, daughter of Sola, daughter of Tars Tarkas," she said. "I am from Barsoom. I have one year of customer service experience, and I like sports, painting and I was separated from the U.S.-Galactic Bank facility during a razorback invasion, so I'm here to learn operations."

"Thank you," said the instructor.

Ibira returned to her seat.

Tars Tarkas. I chuckled and shook my head.

As hard as it was to believe that this...oddly attractive...female came straight from storybook land, it was no harder to believe than the fact that she existed in the first place.

I grinned at her, then looked away.

I was called up next. I told the class I had a year of customer service and collections experience, and that I make comic books about violent squirrels. I sat back down.

With introductions out of the way, Vuembi led us through another grueling computer lesson.

Hearing a familiar voice behind me discussing the thirty eight sexual positions, I turned around to confirm my suspicion.

Zia! I thought. What is she doing here?

I stared at her, but she paid me no mind.

In the middle of a lesson about how to toggle customer information files in the program, I saw Victor pushing a cart loaded with boxes through the door.

I stared at the dwarf as he handed everyone on the first row a folded piece of white plastic.

"What are those?" I said.

"I don't know," said the green person.

"Those look like diapers," said the guy behind me.

Victor handed Ibira a diaper, but she waved her hands dismissively.

"Suit yourself."

And then I found one being thrown on my desk.

"What the hell is this?" I blurted.

"What does it look like?"

I gawked at him in disbelief. "You're seriously going to make us wear those."

"Well," Victor said. "People always bugged me about training. `Where's the training, Victor? Where's the training?' So then I said, `Here you go! Here's your training...pants!"

He burst out laughing.

I just stared at him.

"Just kidding. We don't have breaks in this company. Management decided the main reason for breaks is for using the toilet. Problem solved."

I frowned, refusing to believe what I was hearing.

Victor shrugged. "Schedule adherence is a bitch. What can I say?" He gave me a flippant smirk. "You can put these on whenever. Obviously, we don't want to go blind, so use common sense. Hold it until dinner if you have to."

"I'm not wearing that," I said.

Victor shrugged. "It's not a requirement, but you're required to work an eight hour shift with only one thirty minute lunch break. It was either this, or fitting everyone with catheters. We discussed surgical procedures at one point, but the company couldn't justify the expense."

"I'm pretty sure this is considered sexual harassment."

"Good luck trying to sue. The company and call center officially don't exist on earth, plus diapers are standard wear for astronauts."

With a sigh, I took it. "So we have to wear these."

Victor nodded. "Or hold your bladder the whole eight hour shift. If you think that's bad, you should see some of our uniforms." He delivered a diaper to the next student, giving me one last parting shot. "By the way, we're not going to change your dirty diapers or wipe your butt for you."

"Aww!" someone jokingly moaned.

I stared at the diaper, feeling humiliated and sick to my stomach.

"Your species has inefficient bladder configurations," said Ibira. "Especially your females when they're pregnant."

I unfolded it with a scowl. Although it resembled the standard adult incontinence product, it actually had sort of a mesh filter around the evacuation areas, and it didn't seem to be made of the usual cheap material.

Vuembi leaned over my desk. "It filters urea into water that it stores in pouches you can empty in the greenhouse or shower. One of the pockets contains waste pellets, which you can also toss into the greenhouse."

"Pellets?"

He shrugged. "Dehydrated excreta."

I grimaced. "Oh...kay."

"This will be your last fifteen minute break," said Vuembi. "Go."

As much as I hated to do it, I decided I'd have to do what I was told to keep my job. Shaking my head in disgust, then, I left the room, following my classmates to the bathroom.

I don't think I will ever do something more awkward and embarrassing in my entire life. To change into a diaper in front of other men in a crowded restroom... Ugh. It was horrible.

I returned to the classroom, walking kind of funny on account of the diaper.

I tried to ignore my discomfort, forcing myself to pay attention to the teacher as he activated a computer and started the next lesson.

Complaining of problems with her computer device, my green companion changed desks, seating herself in the row in front of me. Conveniently, she had chosen one which allowed me to admire her body without having my view obstructed by a chair.

When the creature noticed me staring, she rolled her widely spaced eyes and turned away.

We spent the next two hours learning how to operate a myriad of confusing programs , menus and notation screens.

I often got bored of the repetition, and found myself staring at Ibira again.

She caught me this time, frowning and furrowing her brow in confusion.

Turning red in the face, I bashfully smiled and waved to her, and action that caused her to giggle, her skin seeming to change tint.

She batted her lashes at me, stuck out her oddly shaped tongue, and turned around in her seat.

With the exception of a few random appraising glances, she didn't look at me again for the rest of class. The change to her skin color almost seemed permanent.

I gave up, driving myself deeper into the training.

At last, before I thought I could take no more, Vuembi stopped the drills and said, "Before I dismiss you for the day, each of you need to be measured for the new T2 agent uniforms."

Uniforms? The very thought made my stomach sink. Were there deposits? Was I to wash and maintain these things? Why couldn't I dress business casual like I normally did? I had regulation slacks and shoes.

Just about everyone in class murmured in dismay.

I was upset, but I knew it was no use to protest. I learned a long time ago not to argue with a company. If something is stupid, inconvenient or ridiculous, it's usually deeply grounded in the foundation of the company itself and cannot be changed.

"Since we're in training, wee use a graphic of your badge to represent you during the video conversations. But soon you will be going live, which means you will need to maintain a professional appearance appropriate for the demographic we're serving. We will be issuing your uniforms tomorrow. Today I want you to file out into the hallway, one by one, so Ewemla can get your measurements."

I didn't know Ewemla from Adam, but I figured I'd find out soon enough.

"I'm a large," I said, trying to avoid an annoying inconvenience. "My waist is 32."

"Nice try," said Vuembi. "But Ipsego sizes aren't measured that way."

When the turn came for her row I saw the green girl stand up, but Vuembi muttered something to her and she sat back down.

I leaned over my desk, motioning for her to come over and speak to me.

"What's wrong?" I muttered.

"The outfits only have two sleeves," she smirked.

I reddened. "Are they going to get you a four armed uniform?"

She shrugged. "Perhaps in a few months. It has to be discussed with HR. Currently they think that my quasi-primitive appearance will give customers a sense of user friendliness and easy to understand simple communication, making my skill and efficiency a pleasant surprise."

I gave her a grin. "I see."

Vuembi motioned for me to join the others in the hallway, so I stood up and walked out to there, where I saw the bald lunch lady kneeling next to one of my female classmates with a measuring tape.

She wrote something on a tablet computer, then waved me over.

The measuring turned out to be surprisingly detailed, like they were fitting me for a suit. Arms, legs, chest, inseam. I laughed at the fuss, but...Whats Her Name seemed completely serious.

She didn't say a word about the diaper. I didn't have to strip it off or anything. She just measured it like it was. That really didn't make sense to me. But she didn't ask me to do anything about it.

"You'd look nice in a dress," she said when she had finished.

"What?" I blurted.

She acted like we were talking about something completely ordinary. "Have you ever put on a dress before?"

"Never," I said.

She gave me this disarming smile and said, "Would you?"

I screwed my face up in disgust. "No way. I don't do that."

"Why not? It's only fabric."

I just shook my head. "I wouldn't. That's all. Are we done?"

She laughed. "Yeah."

But as I was walking back in the classroom, I heard her say, "Once we get you loosened up a bit, you're going to be fun!"

Class didn't get dismissed like I hoped. Instead, Vuembi commenced a lecture on the mathematics of Arcuva, which I guess was some sort of universal alien currency. The Arcuva has three decimal places after the "dollar", which is annoying, especially since the "ten" placeholder (the one that follows the "dollar") only goes up to sixty before rounding up to change the "hundred" spot, which, oddly enough, actually goes to a hundred. So the one goes to ten, the ten goes to sixty, and the others are normal.

And I thought I hated math before.

After this lecture had gone on for more than half an hour, Vuembi dismissed us, much to my relief.

I still hadn't gotten used to the idea of peeing on myself, so I hurried away to the bathroom.

Unsurprisingly, the place was near empty, with only a couple guys standing near the wall, plugging hoses into their diapers.

I used the toilet the normal way and washed up, wandering off in search of the food.

I hadn't thought to pack extra meals, so I was completely at the company's mercy, hence why I sought out the downstairs cafeteria.

I followed my classmates to the room.

The smells that greeted me were not conducive to a healthy appetite. While I could smell potatoes and a cheddar broccoli soup, I also detected sour cabbage, a kind of meat that smelled rotten, and something scented of epoxy, or moth balls.

To my shock, behind the buffet counter, I saw Sam, team lead from Sprint, ladling out scoops of potatoes and strange looking meat.

I followed a line up to the counter, staring at the people and the compartments of food. I couldn't see a cash register anywhere.

I approached a young girl in an apron at the far end of the buffet, waving to get her attention.

"Hey," I said.

She smiled. "Hey."

She had a pleasantly rounded face and caramel brown skin, but her head had been shaved completely bald, adorned with only an abstract pattern of dark brown spots.

"Um..." I stammered. "Is there a cash register around here somewhere? I have a debit card..."

She giggled, looking into my eyes. Her irises were huge black orbs, a weird an unnatural feature in an otherwise ordinary but beautiful face.

"You're new here, aren't you?"

I shrugged.

"Food rations come directly out of your salary. Take whatever you want."

I frowned. If my lunch was to come out of my salary, I would have at least made sure it came out of Applebees or something.

With a sigh, I got a plate, then followed the line up to the first food station, stared at a steaming tray of greenish red meat.

"What's this?" I said.

"Vornok meat," the girl replied.

Sam leaned over her station. "We mix alien food with the reserves so we can meter it out. You'll get used to it."

"The team acquired it during a sortie," said the girl. "This is the last time we can serve it before it expires."

"It looks expired already," I joked.

She laughed. "Trust me. You don't want to eat Vornok when it's expired, unless you wish to experience paralysis."

"How do I know I won't experience it now?" I cried.

She waved a hand at the other employees eating plates of the stuff. "They look just fine to me."

"I'll take your word on that."

And so I got a piece of...whatever, some cornbread, and some kind of broccoli casserole, carrying it over to an empty table.

The stuff wasn't the most pleasant thing I've ever tasted, like liver, pickles and Waffle Crisp cereal, but I was hungry, so I choked it down a few mouthfuls.

I nearly choked on the "roast beest" when I saw the curvy green body slipping into the chair across from me.

Two of her hands set down a tray of mystery meat and potatoes. A third held a glass of water. The other one self consciously straightened the leather harness that wrapped her body like a rubber band.

"Mind if I sit here?"

I swallowed hard. "Yes. I mean, no. Go right ahead."

She touched her fingers together, muttered something under her breath, then made a dainty slice through the Vornok meat.

Just seeing her doing that slight observance made me suspect that I actually loved her.

Since saying so would make for very awkward conversation, I decided to try safe territory first. "I came in class late after we dismissed. What did you go over in the beginning of class?"

She ate a bite of his food and shrugged both sets of shoulders. "Rolmub policies on Kahico Reeheb and Sniawud, mostly. They say it's similar to earth. Fair lending, harassment legislature, that sort of thing. It's in the packet."

I sighed in relief. "That's good."

We ate in an awkward silence for an uncomfortably long period of time.

"Why were you staring at me?"

I suddenly felt hot with embarrassment. "I..um..sorry. I've, um, never seen anything like you."

She smirked. "You seemed a little more than curious."

I swallowed. "Is that bad?"

She giggled. "No. I understand you've never seen an alien before?"

I shook my head. "Never."

"We have programs, you know."

I gulped. "I'll take your word on that."

She stood up, spreading her arms wide as she turned in a circle.

"See all you wanted to see? Done staring?"

The room felt suddenly sweltering. My cheeks couldn't have turned a darker shade of pink.

My words came out clumsily. "I...um...maybe?"

Her eyes seemed to widen, her skin coloration seeming to change in response.

"So..." I ventured. "You're from Barsoom."

She nodded. "And you're an earthling."

I stared at her in disbelief. "That book is real? John Carter?"

She shrugged. "Yes and no. Barsoom is not the fourth planet from your son, and a lot was changed to appeal to human audiences."

I looked at her skeptically. "Such as...?"

"For one, reports of `Voorginia's' strength are greatly exaggerated. He died. Alone. In a slave pit."

"So how did the story get out in the first place?"

"It was pieced together by his cousin Edgar, from his notes. One of his close friends in the slave mine preserved them until the Vogzom rebellion."

"Wow," I sighed. "That definitely sounds less ridiculous."

Another awkward silence.

I finally got up the courage to say, "Uh..you' look very...interesting."

"I'll take that as a compliment," She laughed. "I suppose I should be glad that I interest you."

She leaned over the table, lowering her voice. "I thought that you seemed..._very interested_."

A lump momentarily caught in my throat. "Is that a good thing?"

She leaned closer, looking me in the eye. Well, close enough to looking me in the eye to make me nervous.

"_Maybe._"

I gave her a nervous smile. "Yeah. I'm interested. You're, uh, really cute."

"Are you saying that you find me sexually attractive?"

She was being a little too forward for me to be comfortable. All I could think to do was quickly blurt no.

She seemed taken aback, almost like I had slapped her.

I didn't want the conversation to go in that direction, either. With my face incredibly flushed, I backpedaled as fast as I could. "That's not what I meant."

Her eyes narrowed in anger. "And what exactly did you mean."

"Okay, okay!" I stammered. "I do find you (ahem), _attractive_, but we don't know each other that well, and I wasn't sure if it was proper to say something like that at this point, especially with all those harassment policies-"

"I find you `cute' as well," she smiled.

I could have fainted.


	11. Chapter 11: Nut Squirrels

I grinned at her nervously for a whole minute, clenching and unclenching my hands.

She chuckled. "It is like I am looking at a mimwab who has caught an asnadh and doesn't know what to do with it."

I blushed as I nodded in agreement.

"Tell me, Jason, do you have any girlfriends?"

"No," I stammered. "Generally they're too much trouble. Plus I never want kids."

"Why not?"

"Besides the expense," I said. "I don't want to pass on my bad genetics to anyone. I mean, sure, God might have some use for a person with mania and depression and anxiety disorder, and weird sleepwalking episodes and whatever else I might have, but I don't want to pass on those bad chromosomes."

Now she looked worried. "Don't you think you're being a little harsh on yourself?"

"No," I said. "I'm inferior to most people. I've failed at a lot of things a lot of other more well adjusted people never had to struggle with. I take embarrassment harder than most people, and I say, think and do things that make me feel like I'm insane. I've thought about trying to marry a girl who has better genetics, but I'd only be ruining a better stock."

"You could use contraceptives," she shrugged.

"No, the odds of that stuff working are not very good. I don't care what they say. I don't want to risk it."

"How about getting your..." she seemed to be struggling with the vocabulary. "Valves knotted? Tied?"

Not understanding, I said, "Get my tubes tied?"

She nodded.

I frowned. "I'm not sure I want to go to that extreme yet."

"So you'd rather sleep with a Qozisa."

I furrowed my brow in confusion, wondering if that word meant what I thought it did.

Seeming to notice my blank look, she slowly pointed an index finger at her naked chest.

I was so awash with conflicting, confused emotions that my response came out in a barely audible croak. "In not so many words?"

She glanced into my eyes, as if to verify the truth of my statement, then looked away, her forehead knitting in thought as her skin appeared to flush neon blue.

We sat in silence.

"Have you been outside lately?" I asked.

She shook her head. "The air is full of poison gas. Cyanide or something. Trust me, you don't want to go out in that."

"So..." I said, fumbling for conversation. "What religion do you believe in?" That sounded awkward, so I added, "I mean, if you don't mind me asking. I'm not familiar with-"

The glowing blue color seemed to ebb from her cheeks. "Wabbod," she said. "It is the faith of the goddess Iss. I give ritual offerings, participate in observances every Tooxri and practice daily meditation."

I wasn't too familiar with what she described, but I understood enough to not be impressed. But then again, she was alien, so I didn't get judgmental about it. "Are there any other gods or goddesses besides her?"

Her skin color now resumed its normal tint. "No. She only has her assistants, Jimnod and Wiqham, the moons of Barsoom, Laridar, the spirit of the soil...I would only consider them...angels."

"I guess that's kind of similar to what I believe."

My face must have shown my displeasure, for she narrowed her eyes in suspicion, tilting her head to one side. "Do my religious beliefs concern you?"

I shrugged. "You're not human, so I guess it doesn't matter if you believe in a goddess. My faith says nothing about converting space aliens, so you can believe what you want, I guess."

"I'm glad I have your permission," she frowned.

Another awkward silence. Ibira seemed to be lost in thought for a moment.

"So you do not wish to convert me to your religion."

I nodded.

"But you mentioned the need for conversions."

"I might have," I mumbled. I bit my tongue before saying more.

"Although you seem guarded in your disclosure of what specific religion you adhere to, it is not difficult for me to guess which one it is." She rested her chin in one of her palms. "Does it offend you that I worship a goddess?"

I shrugged. "You're not human, so why would it?"

She leaned over the table, cracking a smile. "Would you like to observe my religious practices sometime?"

I swallowed. "Um, if by `observe' you mean `watch', then sure. I'll observe."

Ibira grinned. "It's a start."

She checked an electronic gadget attached to her harness. "I'd tell you the story of Bipjok and the horn of Nusnir, but we have to be back in class."

I nodded. "Some other time, then."

We returned to the room, commencing more training about our computer menus, functions, and payment systems, as well as another lesson on currency. Apparently, in addition to the other currency system I learned about, certain planets count out sixty cents to their version of a dollar, and one hundred and ten for others. Again, the word `cent' isn't entirely accurate, but you get the idea. Some planets have a currency that is like the peso, where there isn't a decimal point in that way. The planet Ekmupa actually used three decimals, so it was a thousand cents, or more accurately, Wecimm, to their dollar equivalent.

I wasn't sure how I'd be able to get them all straight without the special program built into the system, or a huge notebook, and I knew without a doubt I'd be hopeless in debating "dollar" amounts on...whatever it was we were supposed to be doing, but I didn't have the luxury of quitting.

Remembering what Ibira had informed me about earlier, I requested a copy of the material I missed. While he strolled over to retrieve it from his desk, I stared at my classmates.

I hadn't noticed it before, due to being distracted with other things, but there seemed to be quite a few pregnant women in the classroom. The fact that they were that many in one place wasn't nearly as surprising as the fact they all sat in one row together. That, and the fact that one of their number included some sort of giant alien rodent with a lizard's tail and octopus suckers running up her back, was quite bizarre and surreal.

My mind reeled with unanswered questions, but I decided this company was an endless series of such questions, so I forced myself to focus on the lecture.

At the end of four hours of this torture, I double checked with Vuembi to make sure we were done for the day, then changed out of my diaper, wandering the hallways in search of my room.

After several minutes of wandering up and down the corridor in aimless directions, I found a doorway leading to a room full of bunk beds.

I know I was able to find my room earlier, to get my lunch, but I was still a newby with no sense of direction in these identical looking gray hallways, so I automatically thought the small room with the bunk beds I found was mine.

I wandered in, staring at the unusually small handful of empty bunk beds, wondering why the mattresses had silk sheets and pillows.

"Where's my stuff?" I muttered. After a moment's thought, I decided it was an executive sleeping area.

I was about to leave, but my curiosity about these luxury accomodations got the best of me.

Seeing a red door surfaced in rubber matting and leather roses, I crept up to the it, staring through the circular window on the top.

The moment my hand touched it, a pair of fuzzy brown ears appeared behind the glass, and then the door swung wide open, revealing a crowd of five foot tall rodents with iguana tails and bird beaks, all dressed in silky lingerie.

For a moment, the rodents just gathered around me, laughing and giggling at various parts of my body, and I stared back, unsure why these things were there, and what they found so funny.

All of a sudden, someone grabbed me, and I was being dragged into a strange sort of hotel suite resembling a dungeon.

The next few moments were a blur of fondling brown paws, shapely humanoid body parts and pecking beaks that caused articles of my clothing to disappear.

My shirt came off first. Then my belt. Then my pants.

The diaper fell on the floor somewhere, but I was unable to retrieve it, even if I had been concerned about such petty things at the moment.

Although I had given that speech to Ibira about how I basically preferred to (ahem) date outside my species, I still had standards that I did not wish to lower. Therefore, even though they were doing somewhat pleasurable things to my body, I didn't much care for the idea of being gang raped by a bunch of squirrels.

In a frightened panic, I struck one of the creatures in the face and climbed over someone else, pushing my way through the mob until I at last escaped their clutches, bolting out the red door.

Gasping and panting for breath, I stumbled out into the hallway.

It was then that I noticed I had on nothing but a pair of white elastic briefs, and someone was walking my way.

Every pore of my body burned with embarrassment. Even in my state of undress, I felt hot.

It reminded me of a time a year ago, when I had to excuse myself, without a stitch of clothing, from my neighbor's basement. To this day, I still can't make eye contact with Mr. Eiffler.

First the naked sleepwalking. Now this.

I wanted to hide.

I wanted to crawl into a corner and die.


	12. Chapter 12: Interspecies Love

Out in a public hallway wearing nothing but my underwear.

Despite its convenience, diving back in the room was not an option, and I didn't see any other nearby place to hide in.

I stared at the approaching figure.

Green.

Four arms.

Ibira, I thought. She wore less than this.

Despite these thoughts, I still found myself blushing.

Ibira stared at me in shock. "Jason?" she laughed.

"Hi," I said sheepishly.

"Interesting choice of apparel," she said with a grin. "I like it."

He blushed even deeper. "It was an accident."

"You need not apologize," she smiled. "It is...cute."

It felt like my whole body had turned red with shame. "It's against dress code, and makes me embarrassed," I stammered. "I really must be going."

She stepped closer, her warm breath tingling my naked chest. "Your reproductive equipment appears to have an unusual configuration."

I stepped backwards nervously. "I'm...sure yours does too."

She playfully ran a finger down my left nipple. "Can I see it?"

"No." And I hurried down the hallway.

"Your rooms are on the right side!" I heard her call after me.

After wandering around the tunnels and getting lost for awhile, I found himself looking at a strange woman with a furry neck and a long feathery tail.

"I'm pretty sure that's against dress code," she giggled.

The woman had on a blouse with ruffles and black slacks, a business-like outfit.

"I got lost on the way back from the shower," I lied.

She laughed. "Where's your towel?"

I told her I lost it, quickly hurrying away.

"Your rooms are to the left!" she yelled.

At last, I found the sleeping quarters, but Victor stopped me near the doorway. "What the hell are you doing?"

I shrugged. "I got lost on the way to the showers."

He laughed. "I'll bet you'll never get lost again!"

Turning red as a beet, I hurried into the room and put on a new pair of clothing.

I caught Victor marching down a nearby tunnel. "Do you know anything about the weird squirrels in this building?"

He looked at me like I were crazy. "What squirrels?"

I shook my head. "Never mind. Hey um, my...uh...diaper thing was..."

"Lost on the way to the shower?" he laughed. "I'll get someone to give you another one."

He stopped walking, glancing back and forth. "When's the last time you've been outside?"

"Maybe twenty four hours ago," I shrugged. "I heard this place is full of poison gas."

Victor shrugged. "That's why we have Bazroks."

"What?"

"It's a large alien organism you put inside your lungs."

I gulped. "Assuming I want a giant flatfish in my lungs, what about the dinosaurs?"

He actually seemed perplexed. "What dinosaurs? This is Pandora."

"Aren't there any flesh eating carnivores out there?"

Victor shrugged. "Depends on where you go." He crossed his arms. "You up for a little trip, or you want to be cooped up here all week?"

I eyed him with suspicion. "What kind of trip?"

"Do you have any fighting skills?

I furrowed my brow, getting more and more suspicious. "I...took karate once."

He squinted at me. "Wait a minute. Weren't you the guy that Snaker pinned to a car and slashed across the neck?"

I frowned.

He laughed and shook his head. "Karate! That's a good one!"

He paused a minute. "Wait a minute. You just gave me an idea. The only real reason why you're here is because of a stupid accident. We never would have hired you if it wasn't for that poisoning thing."

I swallowed. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"What I'm saying is, you're not an incredible employee, or we would have hired you on the spot. You're either bad at your job or just average, so no one's really going to care if you're gone. Productivity isn't going to change that much if you're gone a few days."

No one's going to care if I'm gone, I thought. Nice, Victor. But I didn't disagree with him. Instead, I just shrugged. "Oh...kay?"

Are your emergency contacts up to date?"

Now it really sounded like he was talking about my inconsequential death. "Didn't I speak to someone about this earlier?"

"Perfect. Tell me, kid. You like science fiction? Star Wars?"

I didn't know what this had to do with anything, other than the fact that this call center was chock full of bizarre alien lifeforms. I shrugged. "Yeah?"

"Ever wanted to go set foot on an alien planet?"

In my room I had folders full of drawings of bloodthirsty alien creatures in Judge Dredd costumes shooting up bad guys. "Yeah. all the time."

"Good! Good! Are you afraid of death?"

I shrugged. "Depends on how I die. I don't like my life, but I have reasons not to kill myself."

I saw an expression that seemed to be one of pity, but it could have been simple selfish disappointment. "So you got a death wish."

"No...I still have a self preservation instinct..."

Victor smirked. "You'll do. Tomorrow after lunch, I'll call you down to get fitted with a Bazrok and go with me on a mission."

I swallowed. "So you're going to stick something in my lung then?"

"Yeah. right after lunch. If I were you, I'd catch up on my sleep right now."

Once I had my things together, I took a shower for real this time. I didn't enjoy showering next to other men, but I put up with it, fixing my eyes on the painted concrete walls.

Returning to my room, I made the attempt to rest, unrolling my sleeping bag and trying to prepare for tomorrow, but I was too restless and worried about everything.

I got up, wandering the hallways, taking the utmost care to avoid the rodent room.

"Can't sleep?"

I turned around and saw Ibira walking up beside me.

"Yeah," I said nervously. "It's too early,and this place is strange."

"I can't sleep either," she said. "It's too stuffy. I feel boxed in. I wish I could go outside."

"If it were anywhere else, I'd agree with you."

We stopped.

Stared at each other.

An awkward silence followed.

"I believe we've started on the wrong...foot," said Ibira. "I was too forward. You'll have to excuse me. My culture is very primitive and we do not have the same sexual taboos."

My ears suddenly felt hot. "I..." I stammered. "It's...okay. It was...an unusual circumstance, and...I..."

I couldn't make myself say anything else.

She smiled. "You...did not mind?"

I was blushing now. "I...I don't know what to think."

"Have I caused you sexual confusion?"

I nodded my head vigorously.

"Then let us talk while we explore the hydroponics room. Perhaps we can address these issues in the slow, respectful distance that your culture is accustomed to."

That sounded like a good plan, so I followed her down two flights of stairs and down a long hallway to a room with a wide window displaying a vast greenhouse full of tree saplings, vegetables and other plants.

"Have you been in here?" she said.

I replied, "No. This is where you empty out the diapers, right?"

She frowned. "It waters the plants, yes. The used water from the bathrooms is also recycled and used here for watering."

She took my hand, leading me through a pneumatically sealed door into a lush garden populated with everything from tomatoes to cabbage.

Walking hand in hand, we strolled down a walkway between rows of corn, carrots and onions, taking in the plant exhalations, and the soft mist wafting down from the plant sprayers on the ceiling.

I stared with fascination as squid-like creatures with football shaped heads pruned vines, packed in dirt, harvested and took care of other horticultural tasks.

"The Ishuca," she smiled. "The best gardeners in the galaxy. They have a very special place in my tribe. You wouldn't know it, but they're very intelligent."

She walked up to an Ishuca doing soil samples, greeting it with a series of complicated hand gestures.

The creature responded by flailing its tentacles and waving its tiny three fingered hands.

With a smile, I waved to it, and it waved back.

"You look like a sweet couple."

I stared at the thing in disbelief.

It had no mouth, but its head flashed red as it spoke each word.. "Very unique."

It extended its neck, as if staring at me. "My people have a saying. They say an Ishuca has `elebni ivimbo' when they seek romance outside the species."

I suddenly heard a deep throaty laugh coming from somewhere else. "Now here is a pairing I've never seen before! A Qozisa and a human! Love is a strange thing."

I furrowed my brow. As surreal as it all was, this mockery was rubbing me the wrong way.

Still not believing I was talking to an alien squid, I said, "Well I've never seen a..._talking thing that gardens_ before!"

I felt an elbow jabbing me in the ribs.

"Don't be rude," Ibira hissed.

I frowned. "I'm, I'm sorry." I turned my attention to the creatures. "Well, you seem to be a very smart...um..."

"Ishuca," the creature prompted.

"Right. Ishuca."

"Perhaps you have made a good choice," said the creature. "You definitely need to be taught more tact. Perhaps she can supply you with the necessary respect and courtesy that you appear to be lacking."

Ibira put an arm around my shoulder. "Yes," she said. "He could definitely use that."

I reddened.

She spoke to the Ishuca in hand signs for a few moments, then led me by the hand through a wheat field.

I shook my head. "I thought the...guy's comments about us seemed kind of rude. Honestly, what I said wasn't any more tactless than what he said."

She put a hand on her hip. "Doesn't your religion teach something about turning the other cheek?"

I looked her in her eyes. Approximately. "That's really for human-"

She let go of my hand.

"It wasn't intentional," I said.

"Your tone of voice said otherwise."

Shaking my head in frustration, I looked up at her and said, "How did you know about turning the other cheek anyway?"

Shrugging, she said, "I have overheard much from human coworkers. Why does this not apply to nonhumans?"

For a moment, I didn't know what to say. There was an awkward pause while I formulated a response. "Nonhumans aren't in the bible, so there's no law about it."

"The opposite isn't very loving," she muttered. "Perhaps you should go our separate ways, so you can find a human girlfriend you can show your so-called `Christian love' to."

I swallowed. "I..."

She angrily crossed her arms, rolling her neck.

"I..." I fumbled with my words, desperately trying to tackle a complicated theological dilemma in a hurry. "I...don't know."

"Let me know when you find out."

She stomped away down the path.


	13. Chapter 13: Gardening

As she stormed away, I sighed, still puzzling over the theology.

"You're better off without her," said a voice somewhere beneath a row of corn stalks.

I shook my head. "Do you believe in heaven, mister Ishuca?"

"It's Huegra, but yes, I believe in Cucrah, where we can be together forever with Igxatu and all our lost ones."

"Do they have gardens?" I smirked.

Huegra nodded. "Yes, they're indescribable. Do you intend to chase your romantic interest? While I am enjoying this conversation, I can tell you have something else on your mind."

Indeed, it was true. I really had no good reason to speak about such matters with a glowing squid, except to verbalize my frustration. "Um...I don't know," I said. "I'd say something to her, but my bible isn't up for a revision."

"What does your heart say?"

I swallowed. "The heart is deceptive. It says so in the book."

"What about friendship, then?" the creature's head blinked.

I paused and thought about it for a minute. "You know, I do like having alien friends...;"

I marched up the path.

"Good boy. Go get her."

I found Ibira near the entrance, planting seeds in a patch of soil next to an Ishuca, dejectedly signing things to the creature as she dug holes with a trowel.

I sat down next to them, dirtying the knees of my jeans. "Can I help?"

She rolled her eyes. "Does your faith allow that?"

I smirked. "Look. I'm sorry, Ibira. You know, I was just talking with...that one Ishuca, and he got me thinking. Just because someone isn't your species doesn't mean you necessarily got to treat them like...dirt."

She winced at the unintended pun.

"I mean, I don't have to preach the gospel to space aliens, but I guess it won't hurt to show them Christian love anyway. It's a good model of friendship. It might even save a lost human."

She chuckled. "Or something else if it turns out to be more inclusive than you think."

I didn't know how to respond to that, so I just bit my lip and said nothing.

"Maybe," said the Ishuca.

"How does that," I stopped myself from saying `that thing.' "How does this Ishuca know English?"

She shrugged. "Obviously someone from this company told him `I need some carrots planted over here,' so he had to know something."

I would have asked how to tell the genders apart, but I didn't want to cause another spat. We got up, brushing ourselves off.

As we were walking back to the exit, an Ishuca popped out of a pumpkin patch, holding up a baseball. "Would you like to have this?"

I shrugged. "I...guess. Where'd you get it from?"

"A human was playing baseball here. We thought he'd break the windows, so we killed and buried him here."

I stepped back in fright.

The Ishuca laughed, but it sounded kind of creepy.

"Just kidding. He's still working in your office. But we injected him with a potion that makes him sleepwalk down here every so often to plant strawberries."

I frowned at the creature. "Can that stuff also make you walk around in a loincloth shooting at cats with a bow and arrow?"

I didn't think it was possible to see an expression of bafflement on a squid, but I actually saw it. "No. Why would it do that?"

Ibira gawked at me. "So that is what happens during the sleepwalking episodes you described?"

I nodded.

"This is not Ishuca doing." The creature again offered the baseball.

I nervously reached out and took the it. "I...won't use it around here," I stammered.

The Ishuca laughed. "If you see Robert, tell him the watermelons look great."

I cringed.

"Come on," Ibira said, taking my hand. "Let us continue our walk."

And so we strolled between rows of bean plants and a cluster of rice paddies.

"Um...we don't have a bat," I said. "But we could play catch, I guess. Maybe not here next to the window, but somewhere."

Ibira nodded. "I don't relish getting a xotroc either."

"What exactly is a xotroc?"

Her second hand wrapped itself around my shoulder. "It's...a companion bug. It attaches itself to the nervous system...but it's codependent."

"You mean symbiotic?"

She nodded. "Yes, symbiotic. It gives the host a pleasant burst of dopamine at the completion of its daily task, similar to an orgasm. It's harmless."

I grimaced. "You seem...oddly familiar with this."

She shrugged. "I am a Qozisa. These things are common knowledge in my tribe."

She let go of my hand, putting that lower left hand around my waist. "You shouldn't be so upset that the Ishuca made comments. After all, no one has ever seen a Qozisa with a human boyfriend before."

My face turned pink. "I guess not."

We returned to the hallway, marching down to a section of the building relatively free of breakables. There we practiced throwing and catching for a few minutes.

When Ibira decided to try throwing from a greater distance, the ball bounced off my hand, rolling through a door frame into a room with bunk beds.

I took one look inside and backed away.

Noting my apprehension, Ibira marched up to me with her hands on her hips. "What is the matter?"

"I'm not going in that room," I said. "There's some squirrels in there..." I lowered my voice. "And I think they want my nuts!"

She laughed. "You? Afraid of a bunch of squirrels?"

I nodded. "They're not garden variety squirrels. They're...bigger...And kind of perverted."

She laughed. "Fine. I will retrieve the ball from the squirrels' den."

She stepped into the room.

"Hello! Squirrels! I am retrieving my cowardly friend's ball! Do not disturb his nuts! He has other plans for them!"

With a laugh, she stepped back out, throwing me the ball. "I saw some clothing in there. It looked like yours, but everything was covered in slime. Are you sure the squirrels didn't already take your nuts?"

I swallowed, shaking my head. "No. I, uh..." I dropped my voice to a low mutter. "I got away before they could take my virginity."

She laughed. "I can tell."

She waved at the room. "Are you sure you don't want your clothing back?"

I nodded. I didn't even want to think about touching that gunk.

We moved the game a little further down the hallway, becoming more adventurous with our throws.

After carrying on like this for about ten minutes, frequently getting the ball lost in various rooms (on my end, of course), we called it quits.

It was like the ending to a first date. We just awkwardly stared at each other, fumbling for words to say before departing for the night.

Ibira dug in a pouch attached to her harness, handing me a stubby twig that looked like a green ginger root with pink and purple spots.

"What's this?" I said.

"It's Gimur Claw. It will help you sleep."

I frowned. "It's not going to give me an orgasm, is it?"

"Would that be bad?"

"I'm not going to get much rest if I'm splurting on myself or spending all night in the room down the hallway planting tomatoes."

"Don't be silly," she grinned. "It's just a sedative. The worst it will do is give you strange dreams. Just chew on it for awhile until you feel it working"

"Uh...thank you." I paused, frowning at the root. "What kind of weird dreams?"

She shrugged. "It varies. Do you want to sleep or not?"

"Fine," I said.

"Just chew on it until you get so drowsy that feel you're going to choke on it, then spit it out and go to sleep."

I nodded. "Thanks. Good night, Ibira."

She smiled at me. "I enjoyed our evening together. I had a lot of fun."

"Really?" I stammered in surprise.

"Yes. Considering the circumstances, I think a platonic kiss to the cheek would be injurious to you, so this will have to do."

Stepping close, she grabbed both of my shoulders, and my hips, giving my face a gentle poke with her tusks.

With a soft purr, she her cheek against mine. "Good night."

With a bashful grin, I left her, returning to the sleeping quarters.

The bunks were now occupied. Sam on top of his bunk, Snaker on the top across from him, other coworkers sleeping on the others.

I crawled into my sleeping bag, chewing the root in the prescribed manner until I got drowsy and spat it out, falling into a deep sleep.

In my dream, I found myself sitting naked in a field of green grass, staring as a naked blue woman from the movie Avatar plugged her dreadlocks into glowing willow fronds dangling from a tree branch above her head.

She swayed back and forth, chanting something in a foreign language.

As I watched, I noticed white plant tendrils curling around my thighs, some of them digging right through my skin, but they didn't bother me somehow.

"Hello?" I called.

No answer.

Suddenly, my eyes opened, and I found myself staring at a suit, and looking up into a blank expressionless human face.

"You've been sleepwalking, Mr. Finch," the man said. "I'd avoid going outside if I were you."

I started, glancing at my surroundings with confusion.

I was standing in some featureless concrete corridor, presumably within the same building I went to sleep in. When I looked back in the direction of the suited man, he was gone.


	14. Chapter 14: Symbiote

The hallway was cold.

Feeling a chill and goosebumps rising on bare skin, I looked down and suddenly noticed I was naked.

Disoriented, I followed a wall until I bumped into a female figure in a labcoat.

Grace Augustine.

With a laugh, the woman handed me a towel, directing me to my sleeping quarters.

Still groggy and tired, followed the directions, stumbling back to my bed.

I put my clothes back on and tried to sleep again.

As before, I found myself in the green field, with the vaguely erotic sensation of the glowing vines wrapping around my thighs as I stared at the blue woman plugging her hair into a tree.

"Hello," she said in my mind.

"Hi!" I found myself saying. "Neytiri?"

"I know no such name."

"Are you...a goddess?"

A second later a giant pig's head was squealing in my face, vomiting a geyser of cold water.

He awoke to the sight of Sam pointing the muzzle of a super soaker at my face.

"Breakfast," he said. "And you'd better hurry because your class is starting in about twenty minutes."

I glared at him, but still felt grateful for the wake up call.

"Oh, and here's this."

Sam threw a folded piece of plastic at me. "Victor said `baby needs his diaper.'"

I scowled at him, but picked it up anyway.

With a groan, I got up and prepared myself, hustling to the cafeteria.

Breakfast consisted of eggs, the side dishes from the previous night, and cuts of orange-purple meat.

"I thought that meat was expired and you weren't going to serve any more," I said to the bald girl.

She nodded. "It was. This is Ikran."

I swallowed. "You mean, like the one Victor was trying to shoot in the hallway the other day?"

"The same," the girl said with a grin. "See? Completely fresh!"

Having already eaten worse, I rolled my eyes and took a slice, seating myself at the table I'd occupied last evening.

"How was your sleep?" Ibira asked me as I hurriedly shoveled food in my mouth.

"Good," I mumbled. "But you're right. I did have weird dreams."

She giggled. "About what?"

I reddened. "Gardening."

Smirking, she stood up. "See you in class."

I finished up and dashed after her.

We met in the same classroom as before. The class seemed smaller, but I guessed it had something to do with the break policy.

"Today we're going to familiarize you with aliens," Vuembi said when everyone was situated. "There are perhaps more than one hundred paying species across the known galaxy. Obviously this doesn't account for the billions that don't have currency or Revnids, but that's not important. I'm going to give you a quick rundown of the species that we do business with most, just so you know what to look out for when you see them."

Using his holographic device, he displayed a picture of a figure in a pink frilly dress, with furry arms and legs and a tail.

"This is a Harfon. They have two sexes, male and female. As you can see in this image, sometimes the males wear outfits that make it difficult to tell which is which. This one is a male. Notice his square jaw and lack of a tuft on his tail."

He then showed the image of a large praying mantis with a slug's head. "The Kascen. They're friendlier than they look. A little hard to warm up to, but if you're willing to humiliate yourself, you can do business successfully with them."

A humanoid rodent appeared.

I shuddered when I noticed the beak. The tail. The lingerie.

I was thoroughly familiar with them.

"The Choroquin. These guys are wild. No sense of decency, no sense of shame, no harassment laws. Their middle name is `indecent'."

I agreed with that assessment.

I noticed Ibira smirking at me, pointing to the image.

I just rolled my eyes.

I looked around to see if that one pregnant rodent was present to give a rebuttal, but she was curiously absent.

"If you see them doing anything inappropriate," the teacher was saying, "Just ignore it and keep doing what needs to be done. Keep professional, don't get distracted, just keep going with the call."

Ibira silently gestured at me, as if to say, "See? That's what you do!"

"Eemember, these calls are being recorded, so don't respond to anything in an inappropriate manner unless...uh, never mind. Just don't."

The image of a rather serious looking man in a black robe appeared.

"The next ones are basically human, so I'll just rush through them."

I saw a man in a strange military outfit.

"Caladan."

The hologram changed to a fat man in a Hawaiian shirt.

"Earth. Self explanatory."

He showed an image of a woman in a shiny black bodysuit.

"Arakeem."

Rahevu. Nobnasaj. Geforav. Coonwu. Isnugi. Sekveh. Uzadotix. He apparently found these places trivial and unimportant.

The next ten minutes were a bewildering blur of zoological specimens.

The moment I had my hand raised to ask a question, the instructor would show a different alien or bring up a new detail, raising two more questions in my mind, and when I asked a question, he'd just say he'd explain it later. Eventually I gave up trying to ask anything.

After we had gotten through the list, the instructor made us open a program displaying policies.

"The laws of the galaxy are different than the ones on earth. There's going to be a lot of things you'll need to watch out for, and a lot of things you'll need to forget you've learned. First and foremost, financial laws differ from planet to planet. Some places have strict laws about how you can collect while others have no laws. We at DOGOS err on the side of caution, except in the cases where it doesn't make good business sense and we cannot compete."

And he went on lecturing for an hour. Despite being extraterrestrials, the material turned out to be surprisingly dry. I took notes the best he could, but most of it read like FCRA legislature and my eyes began to glaze over.

When Vuembi mentioned slavery, I bolted upright in my chair.

"As wrong as it sounds," he said. "Many planets do practice slavery. You will need to watch the prompts carefully to make sure you don't disclose information to them in non Darqul regions, or, in some instances, make sure you don't even talk to them."

"What if you customer is a slave?" I heard Zia asking.

"In those cases, we go by the laws of that region. In some cases, we wear special tags or transfer a special encoded symbol to verify the discussion. Again, I want you all to remember, be professional, no matter what they look like, what they're wearing, or what they're doing."

I furrowed my brow. "What kind of slaves are these?"

"All kinds," Vuembi said dryly.

And that's how deep it got.

For a moment, the classroom erupted in murmuring.

Behind me, I could hear Zia angrily muttering something about unjust evils and oppression and white devils, but when when a student in the seat next to her mentioned that they weren't black and had segmented eyes, she shut up.

"Now, let's go over the Edatro Niopid law," and he spent another hour talking about laws and policies.

"I feel like I've been studying a Warcraft textbook," someone complained. "This knowledge is completely useless."

Vuembi stuck out his chest. "I assure you, Mr. Stewart, that you will eventually use every bit of the knowledge you're receiving in class today, and will likely discover that you haven't studied nearly enough."

A cheat sheet was handed out for the test on major policies, then we commenced lessons on call control and a computer module.

After this, we got a brief language lesson, with some basics on conjugating verbs and noun forms that I didn't see the value of at all.

"Obviously," Vuembi said. "You're not going to learn an entire language in only two twenty four hour periods. Due to this fact, before you take your first calls, you are going to need the aid of a language assistant. How many of you are familiar with the Jandax?"

A few hands raised up.

I glanced around the room for the person who would be assisting the language calls, but didn't see anyone with an appropriately smug grin on their face.

"Right. Not many. Unfortunately, our client speaks nothing but Neepra. But not to worry. We have a special training aid which will be beneficial to you throughout your days of service with the company."

Victor carried around a cart containing a glass cage with a cat sized caterpillar-like insect with a ridged shell. Donning a pair of welding gloves and goggles, he took out a pair of tongs, jabbing them into the creature's back until the tongs came out with a wiggling slimy thing that looked like a slug and a centipede's love child. He then brought the thing up to the side of my face.

"Wait!" I protested. "What is that! What are you doing!"

"Relax!" said Victor. "It's the training aid! It'll only hurt a moment, then you'll be able to understand a million different languages!"

"I saw Wrath of Khan," I cried. "That thing can't be any good."

"Where do you think they got the idea from?" one of my classmates muttered.

Victor sighed. "It's not the same thing, kid. Look. If you don't put this in your ear, you're going to fail the calls, and be out of a job once we get back. Do you want to have to deal with that, or do you want a little alien earwig? To help you communicate?"

He was right. If I screwed this up, they could blackball me. I literally had nowhere to go.

Although I could speak some sort of strange language to Grace, and fluently, from what I gathered in all these lessons, it was not Neepra.

I already accepted the stupid policy about the diapers. If I really wanted this job, I'd have to bite the bullet and do what he said.

I swallowed. "Make it quick."

And so Victor shoved the slimy thing in my left ear, and I felt something slithering and digging around the skin, burrowing deeper and deeper into my ear canal until I felt a sharp shooting pain.

I screamed.

"Damn!" Victor blurted. "I forgot the anesthetic!"


	15. Chapter 15: Lungfish

After a few moments of searing pain, the creature settled into some unknown spot inside my inner ear, and I got used to the pain, calming down.

"Snaa pleihua?" Victor said, staring into my eyes. "Chicelinhua?"

"Jason," said Vuembi. "Ucugoshua. Snaa pleihua? Ucuk feutchik celini."

"My name is Jason and I'm a sissy faggot," said Victor.

"Hey!" I shouted. "First you tear up my ear with this damn earwig, then you insult me!"

"It's working!" Victor called.

"What?" I blinked, staring at the little man.

"Can you understand me?" Victor said.

I nodded angrily. "Do you think I'm stupid?"

Victor shrugged. "You tell me. I just told you a bunch of shit in Neepra and you understood everything I said, including what I'm saying now."

I blinked at him like a frog in a hailstorm.

"Of course, you're not replying right Half the time you're reverting to English, but at least we can tell it's working."

I stared at him. The damn thing actually worked!

"It itches," I grumbled.

"Tell me about it. Sometimes I feel like stabbing the fucking thing with an awl and scrubbing all that shit out of there once and for all."

He just shook his head. "The med lab has salves and stuff to pour in there if you need them."

The others got anesthetic before getting their creature.

Once everyone had an alien creature stuck deep inside their ears, Vuembi passed out phone headsets and little cards with names and login IDs on them.

"You will notice that there are names on each of these cards," said the instructor. "Your human names are too difficult to explain to our customers, so you will be using these from now on. Unlike your old names, your new identifiers are short, simple and professional."

I grimaced as I stared at my card. My new name was Beota.

"Beota, can you understand me?" the instructor asked.

"Guep," I groaned, not realizing I had just spoken in Neepra.

"Good," he said. "You're learning. You're going to have to switch brains to handle these calls. We'll be using English very infrequently, so you might as well shelve your English brain for the duration of our tour of service. In fact, this will be the last thing you'll hear from me in English for the duration of the class. I want you to get into the habit of communicating only in Neepra, Tafcar and Oprin, since, again, none of our customers know English."

"How am I supposed to figure out what language I'm speaking?" I asked.

"In Neepra please."

"How-" I started.

"No, it's `viravo.'"

"Viravo..." The rest of the statement rolled off my tongue without the slightest thought.

"Like that," Vuembi laughed.

"Neepra brain," I muttered in amazement. "Did you actually attach that thing to my brain?"

"In Neepra please."

I shook my head. "Did..."

Vuembi crossed his arms. "No. It's `bav.'"

I asked the question again in the other language.

Vuembi nodded. "The Jandax connects to you brain through nerves in your ear canal."

I swallowed hard. "And..what's..it feed on?"

"The same things your body feeds on," Vuembi said matter-of-factly. "Expect to be a lot hungrier at dinner."

We were shown how to access our scripts and information, then everyone got ready to take calls.

I hate phone headsets. They're itchy and they pin down my hair, making me itch more.

This particular headset looked like the standard model. Mostly. You had the outer part with the stereo earphones, and then you had the little microphone stalk. If you've never worked in a call center, they look a lot like those headsets people use in the Burger King drive through.

It wasn't the standard model.

Upon closer examination, I could see a small mouth inside the right earphone. A closed vaginal slit that pursed and wiggled as if alive.

As I stared at this thing, I watched in horror as a cluster of legs came creeping out like a hermit crab.

Disgusted, I dropped the thing on the floor.

"Pick it up," Vuembi said in a weary sigh. "It wont hurt you. It's just a Wuvju Interface to assist you in communicating with the client."

He made it seem like it were completely ordinary.

I had no choice in the matter. I had to obey. Shuddering, I picked the thing back up.

The moment I put the headset on my head, one of the earpieces swelled, and I felt little claws stretching out and clamping down over my ear.

There was a moment of uncomfortable stabbing and stretching, almost like the thing on the headset was having sex with the creature in my ear, then the two settled down, leaving a sensation like I had a tumor growing on my ear.

It has been my personal experience that you never face challenging phone calls during training. Fate is so mischievous that it will hide the crucial knowledge you actually need until a time when you could possibly get fired for not having it.

And so I sat idle for about six or seven minutes, waiting for a call.

At last, I saw a hologram of a thing that looked like a glowing jellyfish appear in front of me.

I stared at the thing in silence, trying to figure out what I was looking at.

Its multiple eyes blinked at me. "Hello?" A little sphincter beneath one of its eyes expanded and contracted as it spoke. "Is this DOGOS?"

Nauseated, I said, "Hi. Thank you for calling DOGOS. May I start with your name please?"

"It's Yaqe. I'd like to activate my Tepra card."

The whole situation was so unreal and ridiculous that I laughed.

"What's so funny?" the jellyfish creature said with annoyance.

Vuembi, who had been watching me the whole time, silently shook his head. His stern expression indicated that these calls were a hundred percent serious.

Not wanting to lose my job, I pretended I was playing a video game with a speaking component.

"Nothing's funny," I stammered. "Sorry."

I would have said "sir" or "ma'am", but it was a jellyfish, and I am no marine biologist.

"Please activate my Tepra card," the creature sighed.

"Sure." I said.

Vuembi prodded me to verify different things, basically repeating what I heard ten times in lectures. I activated the currency device, said the formal farewell script, and that was it.

After a long period of waiting, a couple more activation calls, and more waiting, our class was dismissed for lunch. Well, all but one guy who was busy trying to defuse a call and had to have Vuembi assist him.

The moment I stepped out the door, I found Victor dragging me down the hallway.

"What?" I said. "It's lunch. I haven't eaten yet."

He nodded. "You got to do this on an empty stomach. Especially since you've got that Jandax in your ear. If there's any adverse reaction, you'll thank me later."

I wasn't so sure I agreed, but I followed him down to the med lab, staring as a pair of three fingered hands drew a curtain around a semiconscious body with a bloody head. Before the curtain completely closed, I caught a glimpse of a diminutive purple form hunched over one side of the bed, poised with a needle.

Judging by the lamps and the rattle of metal instruments, it seemed to be a surgical operation.

At the front desk, apparently subbing for the two medics, I saw a blue skinned cat faced creature in a lab coat. This stranger had gills, and ears that looked like they belonged on a chihuahua. He was bald save for a single braided piece of hair attached to the base of his skull, a braid which terminated in a device connected to a USB plug.

"Hello, Nobdar," Victor said. "Nice of you to show up!"

"I was observing Batlas," the stranger grumbled.

"Been observing a few cases of Mamnoc?"

"Is it that obvious?"

Victor laughed and shook his head. He pointed to the curtain. "What you got going on over there?"

"It's Rick. He thought he'd be clever and smash a beer bottle with his head. I've just finished cleaning up the blood."

The midget giggled and made tsk noises in response. "Listen, my friend. We need to get this guy fitted with a Bazrok."

"Another one?"

Victor shrugged.

"We just had it lay one a few minutes ago. It'll take it days, possibly weeks for it to make more. Are you sure you want to waste it on a new hire?"

"I don't want to risk a...seasoned employee on something like this. Trust me, this will save us revenue."

The blue guy gave the midget a skeptical look.

"Let me put it another way." Victor crossed his arms. "Right now, we don't even know what to do with this nerd. He wasn't even supposed to be here. I figure we might as well throw him out there, maybe see if he's useful for something."

"Better make it count!"

Nobdar gestured to an open bed. "Have him lie down over there. I'll get the Bazrok mother out of storage."

I stared at the stranger for a moment as he plugged his hair USB into the computer, but then Victor was dragging me over to a hospital bed with a rubber covering.

Nobdar stepped through a small door at the end of the room.

Feeling a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I got up on the slick surface, staring at the other patient's curtain as Sal and someone with a gravelly voice mumbled something about glass and stitches.

I waited, and waited, watching as the curtain came open and a a woozy looking gray haired guy with tattoos rolled off the bed, stumbling to the door. Then I waited some more.

"What time is it?" I muttered.

"You're exempt from class. Don't worry about it."

Victor glanced at the small door. "You might want to take off your clothes. This thing makes a mess." Then, apparently noticing my look of dismay, he added, "Don't worry. I won't look."

"Seriously."

He gave me a look like I were stupid. "Kid, why do you think we're using the rubber bed? Of course I'm being serious! If you want clothes caked with slime, be my guest. I'm just saying, it might be a good idea..."

I just stared at him.

"My recommendation: At least take off your shirt."

With a sigh, I stripped to my diaper, setting the clothes on a supply cabinet nearby. "Do I at least get a gown?"

He laughed. "No."

I sighed in frustration.

A few minutes later, I saw the blue guy marching up to the bed with a glass tube containing a big squirming bug with rows of glowing eyes running down the sides of its body. A forked tail snapped back and forth at the end of its centipede-like body, oozing with translucent glop.

Seeing the thing coming toward me, I sat up, attempting to slip out of the bed, but Victor pushed me back. "You want to go outside, you gotta breathe the air."

I paled. "Then maybe I don't want to go outside."

I tried to leave again, but then the female elf came over and pushed me down on the rubber mattress. "Stay where you are, scrawny."

"C'mon, don't be a pussy," Victor said. "It ain't gonna hurt you."

As I stared at the thing, wondering if it weren't as bad as I thought, I felt a handcuff snap around my wrist.

The elf smiled.

"Hey!" I shouted at her. "What's the big idea!"

And then I found my other wrist being handcuffed.

"I just love S&M," she joked.

"Dammit!" I cried. "What is this! Call Center of the Pod People or something?"

"Don't worry," Victor said in a zombie voice. "It will all feel better in a minute." And then he burst out laughing.

"That's not funny," I growled.

"You've already got a creature sticking tubes up your brain. If we wanted pod people, you'd be part of our army right now."

"This will only hurt for a second," Sal moaned like a zombie.

They both laughed.

"Is he more your type?" Victor muttered.

Sal stuck out her tongue. "I like my men with larger muscles. And that sunken rib cage - ugh!"

"You know you like him."

"Only as much as I like little men who aren't tall enough to serve as a leg of a coffee table."

"So there is a chance!"

She rolled her eyes.

The blue guy laid the scary creature on my bare chest with the tail end pointing in the direction of my chin.

The translucent slime oozed across my naked skin, tricking into the cracks of my armpits, dribbling down into my navel.

I stared at the thing as it slowly undulated upwards, rear first, its rows of tiny feet unpleasantly tickling their way over my clavicle area, gaining purchase at the pit of my throat.

I shuddered as it pawed its way over my Adam's apple, crawling over the crest of my chin.

The creature suddenly stopped, and I felt its feet digging into my skin, like it were trying to bury itself inside.

I squirmed and thrashed against the handcuffs, shaking my head in attempts to dislodge it, but then I felt hands pressing down on my wrists and legs, one holding my chin straight, and a chorus of voices shouted for me to stay still.

The ooze had a numbing effect. I felt a tingling sensation everywhere it dried, numb at the armpits, numb along select areas around the breast, numb around the belly, a black hole of sensation in the middle of my belly, and the deadening tingle I felt around my elastic waistband was like the beginnings of some sort of chemical castration.

The creature backed up further, pumping a glob of slime over my chin, coating my rigidly clamped mouth.

It climbed higher. Prongs of its forked tail hooked on the corners of my lips, pulling them open.

I screamed, but it came out as a gurgling sound when the creature squished its body together, dropping a big squirming object into my mouth.


	16. Chapter 16: Pandora mission 1

As this slimy glob filled my throat and nearly choked me, the blue guy leaned over my chest, shoving a white breathing tube down my throat, to the point of making me feel like gagging.

I gurgled in protest, squirming as...oozing blob made its way down alongside the, and then it felt like a gallon of liquid was filling my lungs.

I felt the need to cough, but everything felt numb. Every time I tried it, it only came out as sort of a strangled chuckling sound.

At last, someone removed the beast from my neck, and then everyone just stared at me, waiting for something to happen.

I coughed, but it was unproductive. It felt like something was lodged in there and wouldn't come out.

A suffocating feeling washed over me and I began wheezing and gasping for air. Light headed and dizzy, I glanced out of the corner of my eye and saw the blue guy throwing some sort of switch.

I heard a hissing sound, then felt an odd sense of relief as I inhaled something...that didn't feel quite right.

The blue guy threw the switch again, and the suffocating feeling returned.

"He can breathe cyanide," I heard Victor saying. "We're done."

"Not quite," the blue guy replied. "He has to be able to breathe oxygen while in the building and when he returns to base. He's going to have to stay here until the Bazrok develops its valve adequately."

"And how long will that be?"

The blue man shrugged. "You've given me an asthmatic. As long as it takes."

And so I laid there for what seemed like forever, alternating between suffocation and breathing comfortably as Nobdar threw the switch back and forth. I shuddered as I felt weird throbbing sensations traveling through my lungs, struggling weakly against the handcuffs.

After several more minutes of this, the suffocating feeling stopped, and the doctor was pulling the tube out of my throat.

"We're done?" I gasped.

"Yes. You're breathing oxygen, and you should be able to switch to cyanide outside."

I coughed and sat up, staring at Victor, who had been occupying his time playing Angry Birds on a phone.

I stared at him. "How is it possible for you to play that? Are there phone networks out here?"

Instead of replying, he said, "Oh good. You're done. You pretty much missed the whole class."

I wasn't terribly upset about that. Almost dying puts a lot of things in perspective.

"Since you've probably filled your diaper twice by now, I'd like to turn your attention to the waste disposal units along the back wall."

I just rolled my eyes, impatiently staring at my so-called `doctors' in hopes they would hurry up with their business.

During my brief struggle for life, Sal had been busy doing something on the computer, but now she was marching up to my rubber bed, waving a little device at me. "Heart rate normal. Blood pressure normal. No heart or liver damage."

"Good," said the blue man.

The elf gave me a pleasant smile, but I wondered if it were merely the standard nurse's facade. "Well, Mr. Finch, it looks like your implant is working!" Her tone was buoyant, perhaps condescending. "We've just successfully added a Bazrok to your lungs. In case you didn't know already, a Bazrok is a symbiote that bonds to your alveoli to change cyanide into oxygen. As a symbiote, it needs to feed on something, so you'll notice that your metabolism has increased. You will be hungrier sooner and you'll be wanting strange things. Palukan and other wild game actually provide necessary components, provided you remove their poison sacs beforehand. Let me or another one of the medical staff know immediately if your body rejects the implant."

"Palukan?" I said. "What's that?"

Victor frowned. "Seriously? The guy who's making cracks about Grace Augustine doesn't know what a Palukan is?"

"So it's like a weird horse," I said.

Sal nodded. "There's a whole carcass in the walk in freezer," she smirked. "They'll probably serve it tomorrow."

"The Bazrok feeds on the same material that your Jandax does. Like any bodily organ, it derives its nourishment from matter in your bloodstream."

"Of course," Sal said. "That's an oversimplification, since you probably know that the human lungs distribute air to the various cells, which makes it less of a leech than your translator."

"It's still a leech," Victor muttered. "It's just a more useful one."

"You're going to be hungry a lot."

"All right, newby," Victor said, motioning for me to move. "Come with me. We've got a job to do."

And so I got dressed and followed the midget down the hallway, taking the route I originally took to get to the Sprint break room.

As we reached the top of the stairs in the empty call center room, I pointed to the desks with their unattended computers and phones. "Does anyone use these things?"

"That's our backup system," Victor shrugged. "During our early days, we used these stations for our business, but the client started requiring holographic technology, so we aren't supposed to use them anymore except for training and times when the system goes down. You'll notice that these desks all come with Varvoxes."

When that comment drew a blank look, he added, "You know, that super secret proprietary device you were fucking with in my cubicle."

I told him I hadn't done anything to it, but he just said "Right!" and stomped over to the door.

He had to get on his tiptoes and pull the handle to get the door open, like a little kid. I would have helped him, but there are certain things a male adult wants to do out of pride, regardless of height, so I didn't say anything. I just watched him shove the thing open like it were a massive portcullis on some large castle, following him as he waddled out into the hall.

As I neared the break room, it took me a minute to notice the addition of a new wall. I stared at it, dumbfounded.

"Did you get rid of Sprint?" I blurted.

Victor rolled his eyes. "I wish!"

I still didn't get it. "Are the employees walled up inside there or something?"

My companion burst out laughing. With a mischievous grin, he rapped on the concrete, then yelled, "Hey! You guys! How are you holding up in there!"

He pressed his ear to the wall, so I did too.

No answer. When I knocked, it sounded solid, not hollow, and there were no call center sounds that I could detect.

Victor chuckled. "I can see why they hired you now! You're the comic relief!"

I crossed my arms. "C'mon! What happened to the Sprint department?"

Victor frowned. "They're busy taking calls. On earth." He motioned to the exit. "Let's go."

I told him to wait, because I needed something to drink.

He sighed. "Fine, fine. I'll be out front. Hurry, will ya?"

Nodding, I dashed over to the water fountains in the hallway near the restrooms.

When I returned from my swig of water, I suddenly noticed Harry standing by the window, staring out.

"So Shortie's got you running errands outside, is he?"

I shrugged. "Looks like it."

"Good luck with that!"

He rolled up his sleeve, exposing a strange looking purple-brown growth branching up and down his arm like a second set of veins. "Got that on the Dagobah expedition."

I furrowed my brow. "Dagobah? Like the planet Yoda lives on?"

Harry chuckled. "Sort of. It _is_ a swamp planet, but The Force isn't actually real. Well, not real enough to allow you to levitate rocks with your mind. And those snakes..." He whistled through his teeth. "They get pretty nasty over there. Sal patched me up the best she could, but she couldn't get this thing removed without killing me."

I sighed. "Sorry to hear that."

"Anyways, I swore off of those trips after that."

I nodded.

"I noticed you've found a new lady friend," he said as he drank from a bottle of tea.

"Uh yeah. She's nice."

"I think she'll definitely give you an extra hand with..._whatever you're into_," he laughed.

He sipped his drink. "It looks like the guys are briefing outside. You'd better join them."

With a nod, I hurried through the security door, out into a field of squirming grass, staring at the blinking vines and unusually geometric foliage.

Feeling a tug on my pant leg, I followed Victor further across the field, until we reached a clearing where a group of figures huddled around a drawing in the dirt.

As I came closer, I noticed Brian, still dressed like a young Republican, squatting on one end, pointing to a box on the corner of the diagram, while Sam and the IT guy sat on their knees, staring intently at what was depicted.

Sam wore green-purple camo gear, like he were doing covert ops in Barney's house. The IT guy had on heavy chain mail, making him look like an overweight version of the knight from _The Last Crusade_. Snaker squatted next to them, clad in his usual street clothes.

The figure in chain mail pointed to a box framed in circles and wavy lines. "The hummer is here. It's turned on its side and the windows are broken because the Ikrans thought it was a female. You'd think they would have left it alone, but it seems they're too stupid for that.

"What we need is a distraction." He pointed to a circle next to the box. "Someone has to climb this ridge over here to break open our Eau de Ikran here," He stabbed a spot on the dirt. "Or on the other side of this swamp to the left, if the wind isn't going that way." He gestured to a wavy line. "The exploded pheromone bomb should distract them long enough for us to free the Hummer and get out of there."

"Right," said Victor. "Once those Ikrans clear out, we'll need to get in there with cleaning chemicals and odor neutralizers so we can safely set up the jacks."

"So who's going to get juice detail?" said Sam.

"You spoke first," said the IT guy.

"No way. I threw the stuff last time. They almost chewed my arm off!"

The midget jabbed a finger in my direction. "Greenhorn will do it." And then I'm being slapped on the back.

"What!" I cried.

"Sorry, kid," Victor said. "You get sex juice detail."

I reddened. "I got what?"

Giving me this look like it were something completely ordinary, he said, "You're going to take a big ball full of Ikran vagina and break it open in a field so we can get to the Hummer."

"Shit," I muttered, causing my companions to laugh.

"Ready?" Snaker said.

"Let's do this thing," said Sam.

Snaker stood up, running around to the corner of the building.

"Where's he going?" I asked.

"He's getting the pussy juice."

A few minutes later, I saw Snaker carrying a large canvas bag over his shoulder. When he reached the group, he set it down, handing out weapons and ammo.

While the rest of the group got guns, I only got a hunting knife and a bag containing a big silver ball, cleaning supplies and a pile of aerosol spray cans.

The IT guy stood up and took out a small device, pushing some buttons. After staring at it for a minute, he pointed into the woods and marched ahead.

"All right," said Victor. "Cel phones everybody."

"What good will that be?" I asked. "You just keeping time or something? Trying to save on flashlights?"

"No," said Sam. "We're going to call Dominoes, and they're going to load a bunch of pizzas into this great big rocketship and drop them off by the Hummer. Then, while the Ikrans are all busy ripping open boxes, _and the delivery guy_, we can each grab part of the bumper and drag it to safety. Of course, we'll all have to stand in the right spot, and dial the number at the same exact time..."

"It's an app," Victor sighed. "It's called Archeron. Steve made it to track down lifeforms. It uses the GPS satellite to locate heat signatures, and vehicles if we're lucky. It's about the only thing these phones are good for besides Angry Birds and Tetris."

"It took me hours to program it," Steve said. "Especially the part that differentiates between hot jungle plants and blue mutants."

"Sometimes it still gives you jungle plants," Sam shrugged.

"Nobody's perfect."

"Great," Victor groaned. "Now I'm hungry. Thanks, Sam."

Sam laughed. "Glad I could help!"

I followed my team through grass and blinking weeds, between trees with growths like fish and alligator scales, into a vast field of plants flowering with multicolored spheres that looked like gumballs.

My mouth watered as I stared at them. Hungry as I was, I reached down to pick one up, but Victor slapped it out of my hands.

"Don't," he hissed. "Are you familiar at all with the concept of priapism?"

I swallowed. "Uh..."

"The last guy who ate one of those things couldn't pee for an entire week. They had to do surgery to drain the blood accumulation."

I frowned at the plants in disgust.

"Also, I've heard it doesn't actually taste like candy," Sam added. "Right, Victor?"

"Shut up!"

I couldn't tell if they were joking or not.

"Actually," said Steve. "I heard the guy quit out of embarrassment."

"Lies!" Victor pointed at Sam. "He's right there!"

"Oh, you're just mad because I'm getting it up and you're not."

"And what would you know about it?"

"The wife of the guy it happened to," Steve continued. "She joined a convent. Swore off sex completely."

"I'm telling you, it's Victor! My girlfriend would stay for the whole performance."

The chunky Grail knight stopped suddenly, raising a pudgy hand in the air.

"Now you're getting it confused. You're actually talking about my girlfriend."

"Quiet!" the IT guy hissed, pointing at a mass of leathery wings. Huddled together beneath a tree with bark like alligator scales, the creatures reminded me of vultures feeding on a corpse, except this corpse had a license plate.

"I got a question," I muttered to Victor. "How many days ago did that stuff get all over the hummer?"

"Five."

"Shouldn't they have figured out it's not a female by now?"

"They have brains the size of golf balls," Victor shrugged. "Plus, since we've had all these males spreading their scent around, it seems they've attracted some females, so it's becoming sort of a breeding ground."

"Does that mean we need the male stuff too?"

Victor looked horrified. "I hope not! The last thing I want to do is sit around stroking Ikran dicks!"

"Oh you know you'd like it," Sam joked.

"Shut up!"

Steve dug a small pinwheel out of his pocket, letting it spin in the wind for a second.

"East," he said, pointing to a distant tree to his left. "Go over there and break open the pheromone."

Victor pulled the sphere out of my bag, pushing a button on the side. "It's unlocked now. If you drop it, or even jostle it a little, you're going to have Ikran juice all over you. Be warned."

I grimaced. "Great."

Steve stared at his phone. "The way looks clear. There might be a couple orwad vipers in the grass, but they should leave you alone if you don't step on them."

"Wonderful," I groaned.

"Go!" Victor cried.

Sighing, I crept across the field in the direction of the tree, making extra care not to jostle the ball.

When I looked back, I saw nobody else moving. They were all waiting on me to finish the job.

As I came within ten yards of the tree, I suddenly noticed their motions becoming animated, waving their arms in an exaggerated fashion.

Baffled, I shook my head and shouted, "All right! I'm going as fast as I can!"

Suddenly, I saw an army of blue pig headed bodies bursting from the ground and the surrounding foliage, with spears and bows raised and ready for attack.

"Shit!"


End file.
